



































■** o 









> > 





























































V 

























^%. 






■% 





















. ' 









V. 















<\. 



- 






- . 

■ 

r 4> 



y -» 



IRELAND 



BY THE SAME AUTHOR: 

HORIZONS 

A BOOK OF CRITICISM 



IRELAND 

A STUDY IN NATIONALISM 



By FRANCIS HACKETT 




NEW YORK 

B, W. HUEBSCH 

MCMXVIII 






COPYRIGHT 1918 BY B. W. HUEBSCH 
PRINTED IN U. S. A. 



OCT -7 1918 a 
&CLA503712 



IN MEMORY OF 

JOHN BYRNE HACKETT, M.D. 

WHO LOVED AND SERVED 

IRELAND 



To Ellen Countess Dowager of Desart, x Aut Even, 
Kilkenny, Ireland. 

Dear Lady Desart, 

It was through your great kindness in 19 13 that 
I was enabled to begin this book. I had most in 
mind, at that time, the direct upbuilding of which 
you and Captain Cuffe had given such models in 
Kilkenny — the woollen mills and the woodworks 
and tobacco culture. When I came back to the 
United States, as I wrote you, I was thinking almost 
altogether of the needless disorganizations of Irish 
life, and I believed there were corresponding organi- 
zations of American life which could be adapted to 
Ireland. An American might not easily imagine the 
salient educative facts that would strike an Irishman, 
but I was convinced that we could apply to ourselves 
much that had been quietly developing in the ways 
of equipping and directing and cultivating American 
citizenship. In spite of Ulster and Sir Edward 
Carson, national and imperial issues were scarcely 
in my mind at all, until August, 19 14. 

Since August, 19 14, we have seen Ireland grow 
more and more uneasy in the powerful currents that 
are sweeping through the world. With the coming 
of the war I confess I lost hold on my first intentions 
and have never been able to take them up again. 
Ireland has remained in my mind, but much less as 
a country relentlessly determined by the will of Ulster 



and England, much more as a country with free will 
and a large opportunity to make that will effective. 
The national will of Ireland has emerged as a great 
reality for me, and in this book I am much more 
occupied with this reality than with the details of 
reconstruction and reclamation. Ireland is too near 
a new arrangement of public authority not to make 
everything else subordinate, especially when its 
claims are so largely misrepresented and misunder- 
stood. 

Apart from the love of Ireland which we both 
share, I believe that our convictions are often dis- 
similar, and I am sure you will completely disagree 
with much that I have written. But I write with 
John Morley's words before me, " The important 
thing is not that two people should be inspired by the 
same convictions, but rather that each of them should 
hold his and her own convictions in a high and 
worthy spirit. Harmony of aim, not identity of con- 
clusion, is the secret ..." I wish I could be as 
sure of my own " high and worthy spirit " as I am 
of yours; but even with my failures manifested in 
these pages, I trust you will read this book in place 
of " the book " to which you gave your friendship 
and support. 

Yours sincerely, 

Francis Hackett. 

New York, June 5, 19 18. 



CONTENTS 

INTRODUCTORY 
i The Imperial Relation, 3 

CAUSES 

11 The Unwritten Version, 27 

in An Economic Approach, 50 

iv The Ways of Nationalism, 99 

v Catholic and Protestant, 129 

CONSEQUENCES 

vi The Economic Legacy, 157 

vii The Political Legacy, 195 

viii The National Legacy, 222 

ix The Insurrection of 19 16, 248 

x Uneducated Ireland, 276 

xi The Irish Idyl, 299 

REMEDIES 

xii Holy Poverty, 315 
xiii Manumission, 343 
xiv The Way to Freedom, 374 

APPENDIX 
The Skeleton of Ireland, 399 



PART I 
INTRODUCTORY 

Were mankind murderous or jealous upon you, my brother, 

my sister? 
I am sorry for you, they are not murderous or jealous 

upon me, 
All has been gentle with me, I keep no account with lamen- 
tation, 
(What have I to do with lamentation?). 

Walt Whitman. 



THE IMPERIAL RELATION 

" And there is another great piece of legislation 
which awaits and should receive the sanction of the 
Senate — I mean the bill which gives a larger meas- 
ure of self-government to the people of the Phil- 
ippines. How better, in this time of anxious ques- 
tioning and perplexed policy, could we show our 
confidence in the principles of liberty, as the source 
as well as the expression of life, how better could 
we demonstrate our own self-possession and stead- 
fastness in the courses of justice and disinterested- 
ness than by thus going calmly forward to fulfill 
our promises to a dependent people, who will look 
more anxiously than ever to see whether we have 
indeed the liberality, the unselfishness, the courage, 
the faith, we have boasted and professed. I can not 
believe that the Senate will let this great measure 
of constructive justice await the action of another 
Congress." — Woodrow Wilson, December, 1914. 

THE PURPOSE OF THE BOOK 

FREQUENTLY in speaking about Ireland to 
Americans I have discovered that the total effect of 
lively assertion is to leave them confused and bored. 
It is largely with the confused and the bored in 
mind that this book is written. There are many 
eloquent and thrilling books on Ireland. The na- 
tional struggle of the Irish people is a fit subject 

[ 3 ] 



for warm and persuasive writing. But the desir- 
able object at present seems to me to place Ireland 
in the clear light where facts can be fairly considered. 
My aim in this book is to examine the condition of 
Ireland, to interpret its nationalism, to show the 
difficulty of its relation with England, to proceed 
from causes to consequences, and then to remedies. 
The reader may easily differ from me in the end. 
He may decide that I disagree with the Tory 
Englishman because I do not allow for the needs of 
the empire, or because the past is too much with us, 
or because I am a particularist in spite of myself. 
Whatever his verdict on these points, I shall have 
failed in my object if I have not improved his op- 
portunity of judging the question for himself. Ac- 
cording to any democratic or liberal criteria, I con- 
sider that Ireland has on its side the durable 
advocacy of the facts. But facts can never be seen 
in their relevance unless they are honestly respected, 
and my chief aim has been to have nationalism 
supply the incentive for writing rather than the evi- 
dence and the arguments submitted for the reader's 
judgment. Both Englishmen and Irishmen are 
solemnly involved in the responsibility for Ireland's 
condition, but it is simple futility to let English 
patriotism or Irish patriotism dictate the inquiry. 

A judicial consideration does, in my opinion, lead 
to the severest conclusions in regard to the actual 
government of Ireland, organic as well as func- 
tional, present as well as past. I think that it can 
be proved that the men in power, Englishmen and 
Anglo-Irishmen, have as a rule failed in the first 
psychological essential of government, entrance into 
the genuine will of the governed. They have failed, 

[ 4] 



for the most part, because they have lacked true 
community of interest with Ireland and because they 
have never really chosen to share in the universe 
of native Irish discourse. Englishmen often will- 
ingly admit the " stupidities " and " blunders " of 
the past that arose from this policy; they have done 
this, point by point, for some hundreds of years. 
But it is invariably the offences of the past that the 
governing class is willing to confess, never the per- 
sisting relation from which these offences have un- 
failingly sprung and must unfailingly continue to 
spring. The offences of the living present are such, 
however, that, upholding my faith in the judicial 
method, I conceive passing sentence to be part of it. 
But while I look to the passing of sentence by fair- 
minded men, whether they be Irish or English or 
American, it is only because such sentence, passed 
for the relief of a people, must involve a wholesome 
transfer of power, the essential preliminary to re- 
construction. This is not the dictate of simple na- 
tionalism. If a writer's approach is unequivocally 
nationalistic, he is punitive, goaded by the remorse- 
less passion of a Sicilian or a Kentuckian. This is 
wholly understandable since, as Justice O. W. 
Holmes has defined it, " vengeance, not compensa- 
tion, and vengeance on the offending thing, was the 
original object " of asserting liability. But, for my 
own part, I honestly distrust the retaliatory spirit, 
even when it is combined with the nationalistic prin- 
ciple. I am afraid of the encouragement that it 
offers to the egoism which sleeps so fitfully inside 
every nationalistic habit of mind. But apart from 
the Irishness of Ireland there is, as I believe, a 
problem of human liberation involved in Ireland, 

[ 5 ] 



and it is because of this that Ireland is bound to pro- 
claim England's liability today. "The very con- 
siderations which judges most rarely mention, and 
always with apology, are the secret root from which 
the law draws all the juices of life," declares Justice 
Holmes. " I mean, of course, considerations of 
what is expedient for the community concerned." 
These are the considerations, more pertinent than 
any desire to stone the offending ox, which make me 
believe it right that England and Anglo-Ireland be 
held fully and strictly and promptly accountable in 
regard to the Irish people. 

CELT AND SAXON 
Americans are frequently unable to reconcile the 
nationalistic Irishman's account of England with their 
own impression of the English race and even the 
British empire. Such Americans may like their Irish- 
man, they may want to be hospitable to his emotions, 
but they cannot belie the admiration and respect they 
have long given to England. An Irishman may go 
to any length in defaming the English. He may- 
quote Heine and Voltaire, argue hypocrisy and em- 
pire, display India and Egypt; but there is a firm 
substratum of respect and admiration that he cannot 
easily dislocate. It is only necessary to examine 
Emerson's English Traits to see how a wise New 
Englander really feels about Old England and the 
English. Of course one can find innumerable Amer- 
icans who have used the English despitefully, as 
Senator Henry Cabot Lodge has done in his recol- 
lections, just as one can find a number of Americans 
who take the English as their superiors. The emo- 

[ 6] 



tions to which I refer are different. They are rea- 
soned and proved by experience, like Emerson's. 
They are not derived from the mere size and wealth 
of the empire, though the benignity of time to Eng- 
land is in itself influential. Nor do these feelings 
depend on the impressiveness of force majeure, on 
the one hand, or the fairy tale of Pax Britannica, on 
the other. The languor of a peerage long installed, 
the dignity of the law lords, the timbre of society, 
the cut of clothes, the acolyte strictness of servants, 
the art of garden parties — these may engage some 
people, but what the sane American sees to admire in 
England is something that springs out of a depth 
and reliability of character which is not less pro- 
claimed by the superb and massive achievement of 
English law than by the sustained glory of English 
literature. No one who has mingled in this proces- 
sion of a people's consciousness can fail to find in it a 
greatness of reception and a greatness of response of 
spirit. As the bells of Oxford chime their varied 
music, so the tongues of English literature sing many 
different tunes; but at the heart of them there is the 
unison of something deep and generous, something 
well sent and well found. To reconcile the experi- 
ences of English literature, not to speak of personal 
English contacts, with the theory of a purely malig- 
nant policy in Ireland is a psychological somersault 
the intelligent American is not prepared for. He 
may admit that some of the most famous Englishmen 
have been Scotch, Welsh and Irish; he may agree 
that along with stout English honesty and simplicity 
and courage there go a stiff legalism, a resolute self- 
preference, a disinclination to think for the other 

[ 7 ] 



man. But, agree or not, the evidence on the side 
of fairness — of honesty, sobriety and industry — is 
altogether too stupendous not to make a race com- 
posed wholly of Richard the Thirds seem incredible 
and laughable. It may be granted that layers of 
evidence have to be penetrated before the American 
grasps the paradox of Anglo-Irish history; but the 
solution of that paradox is never diabolism. The 
American is absolutely sound in the instinct which 
compels him to reject the wholesale indictment of 
England. 

The wholesale indictment of Ireland belongs in 
the same psychological category. Everyone knows, 
of course, the compensatory account of Irish gran- 
deur and glory that has squared the patriotic bal- 
ance. The technical names of this sort of idyl are 
sunburstery and raimeis (rawmaish). "Our poor 
people," said John Mitchel, " were continually as- 
sured that they were the finest peasantry in the world 
— ' A One among the nations.' They were told 
that their grass was greener, their women fairer, 
their mountains higher, their valleys lower, than 
those of other lands; — that their 'moral force' 
(alas!) had conquered before, and would again: — 
that next year would be the Repeal year: in fine, that 
Ireland would be the first flower of the earth and 
first gem of the sea. Not that the Irish are a stupid 
race, or naturally absurd; but the magician be- 
witched them to their destruction." The origin of 
this Irish bombast is far from obscure: it was gene- 
rated to meet the conquerors' version of the con- 
quered. Englishmen, it may be admitted, had not 
failed to paint the Irish portrait. We know how 
Texas feels about Mexico. The Texan is a eulogist 

[8] 



of the Mexican compared with Milton describing 
the Irish; and nothing is more astonishing, as I hope 
to show later on, than the unobstructed flow of this 
early prejudice down to the present time. Mixed 
up as it is with a strong feeling about the papists, it 
is to be disclosed today not only in East Anglia and 
Ulster but in Back Bay, well-named, and up and 
down the Connecticut Valley. The commonplaces 
of such wholesale indictment go quite contrary to 
the commonplaces of political science. They vio- 
late everything we know about human educability 
and governmental institutions and race culture. Yet 
in spite of the invincible lessons of sociology and 
psychology — lessons which the country of the melt- 
ing pot really does lay store by — we find assump- 
tions deeply discreditable to Irish character, espe- 
cially as regards truthfulness and reliability and hon- 
esty and industry, firmly implanted in the popular 
mind. 

It may easily be held true that there is an aborig- 
inal Irishman exactly like the Punch cartoon of the 
Irishman. It may be quite true that the Irish be- 
lieve in priests and fairies and machine-politicians, 
instead of Mary Baker Eddy and " secret reme- 
dies " and the direct primary. But the way to judge 
the Irish, like the way to judge the English, is to dis- 
regard as completely as possible those explanations 
which, pretending to be supported on a last ultimate 
elephant of fact, are really part of the universal art 
of self-deception. The experienced woman suffra- 
gist will know precisely what I mean. There were 
few men, twenty years ago, who were not ready to 
expound the eternally valid reasons against women's 
ever voting, whenever the male was asked to re- 

[ 9 ] 



apportion political power. A great deal of Irish con- 
troversy has turned on just this kind of prejudice. 
There are volumes of English speeches to show why 
the Irish are not " fit " for self-government, speeches 
amusingly illustrated with shillelaghs and pigs. 
There are columns of English print to indicate that 
the Irish are beyond discipline and self-control and 
initiative — though of course they make excellent 
soldiers, where discipline and control and the rest 
are not undesirable. It does not matter that these 
self-defeating arguments have long since been an- 
alyzed and tabulated by social science, that the rea- 
sons why they are used are quite as clearly intelligi- 
ble as the reasons why little boys scrawl dirty words 
on blank walls. The kind of people who believe in 
the wholesale indictment of a race do not care. 
They cling hard to their archaic practice, let who 
will be clever. At the moment, at any rate, it is 
only necessary to note their existence, and to assert 
the probability that their method leads nowhere, that 
it has no virtue in it, that it is bred in the lairs of 
instinct. 

Many people who rise clear above prejudice can- 
not help feeling that the Irish question is largely a 
sentimental question. The war may disclose un- 
expected differences between Britons and Irish na- 
tionalists. It may show an astonishing vitality in 
nationalist sentiment. Yet the governments that 
have dealt with Bohemia and Armenia and Russia 
and Poland have shown what ruthlessness can really 
be, and beside such ruthlessness the indignities to 
Irish nationalism seem scarcely worth recording. 
In the dim past, perhaps, there were crimes and 
blunders, but we are compelled to deal with the 

[ 10] 



present, and the hardships of Ireland in the twentieth 
century afford nothing like the physical enslavement 
and degradation which are still the iron rule under 
dynastic empires. This is a common point of view, 
but no more common today than it was forty years 
ago, and nearly forty years ago Matthew Arnold 
addressed himself to it in a manner that is still ir- 
reproachable. So long as the overwhelming issue 
of self-government is not confronted, it is corrupt- 
ing sophistry to talk of the " dim " past and ancient 
" grievances." Such sophistry does not survive the 
critical examination of Matthew Arnold. " We 
shall solve at last, I hope and believe," said Matthew 
Arnold, " the difficulty which the state of Ireland 
presents to us. But we shall never solve it without 
first understanding it; and we shall never understand 
it while we pedantically accept whatever accounts 
of it happen to pass current with our class, or party, 
or leaders, and to be recommended by our fond de- 
sire and theirs. We must see the matter as it really 
stands; we must cease to ignore, and to try to set 
aside, the nature of things; 'by contending against 
which, what have we got, or shall ever get, but de- 
feat and shame '? " 

It is with this desire to promote understanding 
that I have followed Matthew Arnold's good ex- 
ample in going back beyond the immediate past. 
Arnold was aware that this practice was seriously 
discouraged. Moreover, " the angry memory of 
conquest and confiscation " had no peculiar attrac- 
tion for his fine and urbane spirit. But his intelli- 
gence assured him that until anger was dried up at 
its source, as it had been in the case of " the Frankish 
conquest of France, the Norman conquest of Eng- 

[ n ] 



land," it was useless to expect " the solid settlement 
of things " in Ireland. It is with the same feeling 
that I have gone back to facts about which such 
notable works as the Encyclopaedia Britannica are 
either silent or discreetly inaccurate, and have sought 
to relate such facts to the realities of the present, on 
which things that are repressed have usually the 
most powerful bearing. The pursuit of reality 
through the dry regions of economics and politics is 
a task far from congenial to most writers on Ireland. 
Outside four or five Englishmen, a dozen Frenchmen 
and a few Irishmen, almost no one has written im- 
partially and scientifically about the meaning of Irish 
history. Yet its meaning has kept unchanged up to 
the present hour, in spite of modern reforms and 
concessions. And there is no possibility of the 
" solid settlement " until this meaning of Irish his- 
tory is accepted, and statesmanship guided accord- 
ingly. 

There is, of course, a conspiracy of the established 
order against re-reading history in any such spirit. 
But we must remember that persons no more radical 
or fanatical than Matthew Arnold had always too 
much integrity to cajole the Irish people into agree- 
ing to half-settlements and quarter-solutions and the 
kind of bastard statesmanship to which Mr. Lloyd 
George has treated us. It is well to think of 191 8 
when reading Matthew Arnold, and to see how little 
the problem has changed in the absence of a genuine 
adjustment. The adjustment has still to be made, 
regardless of patchwork and makeshift, and it begins 
to be evident that there will be no peace or moral 
satisfaction until it is genuine. It is still appropri- 
ate, in this connection, to quote Matthew Arnold on 

[ 12 ] 



the futility of offering sops for settlement, in obedi- 
ence to the prejudices of the English and Anglo- 
Irish classes in power. " It may console the poor 
Irish," he said, " when official personages insist 
on assuring them that certain insufficient remedies 
are sufficient, and are also the only remedies possible, 
it may console them to know, that there are a number 
of quiet people, over here, who feel that this sort of 
thing is pedantry and make-believe, and who dislike 
and distrust our common use of it, and think it dan- 
gerous. These quiet people know that it must go 
on being used for a long time yet, but they condemn 
and disown it; and they do their best to prepare 
opinion for banishing it. 

" But the truth is, in regard to Ireland, the preju- 
dices of our two most influential classes, the upper 
class and the middle class, tend always to make a 
compromise together, and to be tender to one an- 
other's weaknesses; and this is unfortunate for Ire- 
land." 

REFORMS AND CONCESSIONS 

In the reforms and concessions that came since the 
death of Matthew Arnold, many good persons have 
sought to see the end of the Irish issue, but precisely 
the same forces that were operative in his time have 
been operative since. Modern Anglo-Irish rela- 
tions were integrated by Parnell. With the tragic 
end of his career there came an end to the clear 
enunciation of Irish parliamentary policy. It then 
began to be believed by Irishmen that the social cost 
of home rule was too high. A people that had been 
at war for its constitution felt the drain of keeping 
men in the field. An era of political pacifism and 

[ 13 ] 



social reform succeeded. It is scarcely disputable 
now, however, that this tendency to abnegation was 
a reaction, not a development. The feud in which 
Parnell expired brought discredit on the Irish par- 
liamentarians. The poorest leaders seemed to be 
those same parliamentarians, and by contrast the 
most high-minded men either those who started to 
work for a sound extra-governmental internal econ- 
omy or those who preached Sinn Fein, — Ireland's 
refusal to cohabit with her ruler. For the twenty 
years, 1 894-1 914, these were the prevailing faiths of 
the best Irish citizenship. The struggle for a new 
constitution, the home rule struggle, seemed a mat- 
ter of convention and routine. 

The exigencies of the present European war 
proclaimed that nationalism was not altogether a 
chimera of the sentimentalist. When men are asked 
to enlist in the defence of the empire, it proves that 
the relation to the empire is a real and exacting one, 
and that those who assumed the status of the union 
to be good enough for all practical purposes were 
actually begging a question of life and death. To 
beg this question was indeed natural. Since Irish- 
men showed so little concern about the substance of 
their statehood it seemed reasonable to contemn 
them for haggling about the form of the state. The 
ache for explicit home rule seemed a mania when so 
much implicit home rule was neglected. The fer-- 
ment and distress caused by the external relations 
suggested unhealthiness of soul, sentimental evasion 
of the corrigible difficulties within. But the de- 
mands of the war indicate that the constitutional 
question was anything but academic. It is the eco- 
nomic homilists who are indicted by the disorganiza- 

[ Hi 



tion of the Irish mind, in regard to imperial conscrip- 
tion, not the men who claimed to be on a basis that 
was irksome and humiliating. If the bulk of the 
Irish people wanted home rule, there was a time 
when they wanted it largely for the sake of the de- 
cency it would give to their imperial standing. But 
before they had that decency in their own minds, 
before they had the sanction in the empire which 
could make them feel that their fate was British as 
well as Irish, they were summoned to accept con- 
scription. A more disorganized relation could 
hardly be imagined. The man who is summoned to 
the aid of a brother who has ill-treated and misun- 
derstood him is not in a happy frame of mind, espe- 
cially if the brother who is attacked avails himself 
of the crisis to set aside the vital contention as to the 
ill-treatment and misunderstanding, and to talk as 
if he were entitled to full fraternal help. Perhaps 
he is entitled to help, because of the character of the 
attack. That provides a reason for aiding him. 
But to aid him for that reason is a lame substitute 
for the staunch reasons that an adjusted relation 
would have supplied. 

The response of Ireland to the empire was, how- 
ever, amazingly generous. Over 90,000 Catholic 
Irishmen and 60,000 Protestant Irishmen, in Ireland 
itself, volunteered in the beginning of the, war. 
Then the stupidity of England asserted itself. " At 
the most crucial period of recruiting at the beginning 
of the war," declared Lloyd George, before he was 
prime minister, " some stupidities, which at times 
looked almost like malignance, were perpetrated in 
Ireland and were beyond belief. It is very difficult 
to recover a lost opportunity of that kind where 

C 15 ] 



national susceptibilities have been offended and orig- 
inal enthusiasm killed." 

That was stupidity in regard to recruiting. A 
much more terrible stupidity was permitted in regard 
to home rule. When England entered the war it 
was quite clear that it could not expect Irish partici- 
pation unless it faced the home rule issue. This 
was not a palatable fact, but it was a fact. The 
government refused to face the home rule issue. 
Mr. Lloyd George himself pursued the policy of 
evasion that he had inherited from Mr. Asquith, and 
allowed himself all the twisting and turning and 
double dealing and lying that an evasive policy under 
such circumstances is likely to demand. Just the 
results that were to be expected — slack recruiting, 
revolution, coercion — were brought about by the 
insincerities of Mr. Asquith and Mr. George's 
trickiness in regard to excluding Ulster and in re- 
gard to the Irish convention. 

THE ADVENT OF REVOLUTION 

Revolution, I say, was foreseen and expected. 
As early as December, 19 14, I venture to recall, I 
myself asked in the New Republic what England 
ought to do to enlist Ireland, and I spoke as a great 
many Irishmen were freely and candidly speaking, 
both as to the prospect of revolution and the neces- 
sity for dealing with nationalist Ireland. 

" And now, what to do? " the article said. " For 
my part, as an Irish nationalist, I can think only of 
the programme that is being bruited in Ireland. 
Base as were the methods, nauseating the philoso- 
phy, and evil the fruits of British imperialism in Ire- 
land, there is, as I see it, no particular good in Ire- 

[ 16] 



land spiritually or physically affirming its antagonism 
to the British empire at the present time. It is true 
that the government has already suppressed every ex- 
treme nationalist paper in the country and is prepar- 
ing, as usual, to keep alive the spirit of nationalism 
by the unfailing method of coercion. But unless the 
Irish want to commit themselves to the belief that 
statesmanship is bankrupt and that the only way to 
impress England is to injure it, there is still a sane 
way by which the principle of nationality can be 
reconciled to the principle of empire. To find the 
way is the real nobility, if Ireland is not either to 
default like the [German] socialists or to be turned 
into a suicidal slaughter house by the efficient secre- 
tary of war. . . . 

" To remedy such characteristic indifference at the 
eleventh hour, when it is desired that 300,000 Irish- 
men, instead of 150,000, shall go to the continent to 
fight for the Union Jack, is a problem to task even 
such an intermediary as John Redmond. In the 
opinion of those Irishmen who say that revolution 
is brooding, it can only be solved by a definite ful- 
fillment of home rule. Such is the only fair method 
by which nation and empire may be annealed. The 
suspension of that measure fobbed off the Orange- 
men at an awkward hour, but it has left the nation- 
alists in a state of sickened suspense. Ready to re- 
spond, even now, to some proof that England is fully 
capable of treating Ireland honorably, they ask for 
governmental candor. If instead pusillanimous 
silence is preserved, they are prepared, the extrem- 
ists, to do anything that can injure the empire to 
which they are unwillingly allied. 

" If Ireland learns now that home rule is to re- 
[ 17 ] 



main intact, conceding Ulster some guarantee such 
as a veto on all Ulster legislation, the real impedi- 
ment to goodwill will be removed. This impedi- 
ment exists because the government has not faced 
Ulster. It has loudly affirmed that home rule is a 
fair democratic measure, yet it allows Ulster, prop- 
ertied Ulster, to make it stand off from home rule, 
nervously counting the cost. If that is the way of 
empire, it hardly inspires Irishmen to offer their 
lives. 

" Since Parnell committed Ireland to a constitu- 
tional programme, the separatist policy has seemed 
to lose its hold. But in the last year many thou- 
sand nationalist Irishmen have learned the use of 
arms. In spite of Mr. Redmond's efforts to rule 
these men, the most spirited among them are now 
absolutely determined to force Irish demands to an 
issue, and nothing except prompt governmental con- 
cession can keep them from taking a stand. If the 
government, as is feared, begins wholesale arrests 
and coercion, the result will be an abortive revolu- 
tion, sure to be suppressed but evil in every possible 
way. The only honorable scheme by which this can 
be averted is the remittance of Ireland's acceded 
dues. 

" Until this supreme obligation is fulfilled, in ad- 
vance of any draft on Ireland's manhood, the main- 
tenance of the British empire cannot be of real con- 
cern to the majority of Irishmen. If they cannot 
avail themselves of boasted ' public law ' and ' de- 
mocracy,' many are sufficiently desperate to be ready 
for the alternative militarism and ' Kultur.' " 

It is now May, 191 8, three and a half years later, 
and the governing class is still prohibiting the 

[ 18 ] 



settlement that Ireland called for and needed. 
But I confess I am not surprised. The upper class 
in England is never going to accept this situation 
voluntarily. When we remember how the Tories 
opposed woman suffrage, Lord Cromer and Lord 
Curzon and Lord Lansdowne and Bonar Law be- 
ing lined up against suffrage precisely as they are 
lined up against home rule, with Sir F. E. Smith as 
head caddie, we need not expect illumination to come 
to them. Take, for example, the expressions of 
Lord Curzon. Speaking in 1909 against a suffrage 
bill, this particular arbiter of popular destinies de- 
scribed the bill. " It did not stop at manhood suf- 
frage," he said, " it went on to adult suffrage, and it 
proposed that all the ladies'-maids, and the shop- 
keepers' girls, and the charwomen, should be among 
the future rulers of the British empire." Is it any 
wonder, considering these expressions, that British 
labor is at one with Irish nationalism in its distrust 
of the junkers and tories in England? " Lord Cur- 
zon, Lord Milner and Sir Edward Carson are 
viewed with ineradicable suspicion by labor," de- 
clares a friend of Lloyd George, 1 " in that they are 
thought to be essentially undemocratic in spirit. 
Curzon's gorgeous imperialism in India and his total 
lack of sympathy with Indian reformers; Milner's 
cold, remorseless imperialism in South Africa; Car- 
son's exploitation of the old ascendancy prejudice in 
Ireland — these men and the policies they represent, 
are unpopular with the mass of the working classes." 
What must be done? " In war time," suggests the 
friend of Lloyd George, " we must sink personal 
feelings and party prejudices, and mobilize all the 

1 In Lloyd George and the War, by an Independent Liberal. 
[ 19 ] 



talents in the country's service." Is democracy, 
then, a personal feeling and a party prejudice? 

All of this underlies the problem of reconstruc- 
tion, the true struggle of the Irish people. If Ire- 
land were independent of Great Britain tomorrow, 
that true struggle would go on, the struggle of every 
people to attain self-development under the existing 
modern state. At the basis of this integration of 
Ireland must be the people of Ireland, Presbyterian 
and Protestant and Catholic. Their status, whether 
they are industrial or agricultural, is the measure of 
Ireland's place in the civilization of the world. The 
history of these people, so far as they are native and 
Catholic, has been, as I attempt to indicate in the 
next chapter, a history of economic degradation. 
Its correction still awaits Ireland. 

THE STATE A FACADE 

Indispensable as a government is to every peo- 
ple I should be long sorry to begin a book on 
Ireland by laying all the emphasis on its govern- 
ment. The nationalism of Ireland and its bearing 
on the imperial relation go a good way to make Ire- 
land inscrutable — especially when one wishes it to 
be inscrutable. But whatever form of parliamen- 
tary rule Ireland has, whatever the settlement of 
191 8, the realities of the people of Ireland must not 
be held to rest with any temporary governmental 
settlement. 

There are forces affecting the atoms of every 
human group that the government merely gathers 
up and discharges, as the cloud gathers up and dis- 
charges rain. And as the cloud is merely the 
medium of rain so government, the engrossing topic 

[ 20] 



of the ruling class, may often best be understood by 
seeing it in its deference to hidden forces rather than 
in its apparent command of them. To search out 
these forces, to comprehend them and the deference 
that government pays them, is usually a better way 
to reach an understanding of the governmental state 
than to begin with its formal manifestations. This 
does not mean that the state is unimportant. No 
power is unimportant that can be invoked when any- 
one gets out of hand, and that can itself define what 
" out of hand " means. But the word state is 
largely a fagade for the governing class. One must 
remember, and keep remembering, that behind every 
form of government there is a whole people, sover- 
eign yet not enthroned, potent yet not in power, ac- 
countable yet not decisive. Before them the fagade 
of the state is sometimes wheeled, but it does not re- 
pose upon them. The world, as Mr. H. J. Laski 
so forcibly demonstrates in his work on Authority 
in the Modern State, has come altogether too much 
to ignore the vast interests behind the state. Indis- 
pensable the state may be, but too easily it falls be- 
hind the evolution of a people, retarded by the hands 
of rulers. Its importance should disguise neither 
its dangers nor its limitations. Subservience to it 
should never bind the imagination of a people. 

At times great doubt comes into every man's soul. 
No matter what faith inspires him, it seems hopeless 
to persist in the belief that men will ever achieve 
what is desirable — whether it be a freedom by gov- 
ernment or a freedom from it. Every man with a 
personal belief is inundated with surrounding indiffer- 
ence. That indifference creeps into him as a fog 
creeps into a city. Within him as well as without 

[21 ] 



there are voices to whisper indifference to him, to 
lull his memory, to seduce his will, to dissuade him 
from conviction. One of the subtlest of these voices 
tells him that the people are never contented with 
their government. But when a man remembers the 
pretensions of the state and the condition of the peo- 
ple, when he recalls that behind every form of gov- 
ernment there is a gigantic uninstructed power with 
endless vitality, he is inspired to renew his faith and 
speak of the people. He will be told that he is un- 
reasonable, that it is nationalism or some other cult 
that creates the critical relation to the state which the 
ruling class finds so unimaginable. There is more 
than nationalism, at any rate, in that Irish attitude 
to the state which I hope to represent. If Ireland 
were part of the American union or the Italian union 
or the German union, if it stood as Holland or Den- 
mark or Switzerland or Finland stand, another tone 
would have to be employed; but the evolution of the 
people should still be paramount in interest, what- 
ever the governmental equilibrium of the moment. 

For these reasons it is impossible to take " home 
rule " or self-government as the goal of Irish aspira- 
tions, just as it is impossible to wish the people of 
Ireland ruinously subordinated to the so-called unity 
of the empire. The test of Ireland's well-being is by 
no means its self-sufficiency; neither can it be the self- 
sufficiency of the British empire. Its well-being can 
only be justly measured by observing its place in the 
civilization of the world. To complete its develop- 
ment something more may be required than " home 
rule "; something, at the same time, quite independ- 
ent of government, something that includes and 
favors whatever is genuinely heroic in the people. 

[ 22 ] 



When an Irishman visits immemorial England his 
heart may well faint at the prospect of reconstruct- 
ing a land so poor as his own; but it is a prospect 
forced on him by the tragedy of the past. Ireland 
is a depleted country; retarded, handicapped, dis- 
trusted, with the scars of disease upon it, with only 
occasional flashes of supernal grace and beauty; but 
the fact remains that it is for the people of Ireland 
to shoulder their responsibility, to summon their own 
forces to the task of reconstruction, to see their own 
country redeemed and made great. 

The belief that a reconstruction awaits Ireland has 
been held by the people for a long period, but it is 
undoubtedly difficult, both as a matter of theory and 
a matter of fact, to disentangle this problem of re- 
construction from the question of Ireland's statehood 
and the worldwide preoccupation with the state. 
Mr. Ernest Poole tells us that Russian dentists can- 
not get together in a dental congress without arriv- 
ing in twenty minutes at the sorrows of Russia. In 
no different manner have Irishmen been bitterly and 
deeply obsessed by their own problems of govern- 
ment. And the more they talk about it, especially 
to the outside world, the more the real question of 
Ireland's entity and Ireland's destiny is in danger of 
being obscured. 

But government can be the most potent form of 
cooperation, and since, good or bad, government is 
dominant, the form of the Irish state must preoccupy 
Ireland till it is settled. The words of President 
Wilson at Indianapolis in 191 6, in regard to Mexico, 
may be taken to suggest the mood that should sur- 
round and support the Irish people in their demo- 
cratic demands. " I hold it as a fundamental prin- 

[ 23 ] 



ciple, and so do you," said President Wilson, " that 
every people has the right to determine its own form 
of government, and until this recent revolution in 
Mexico, until the end of the Diaz reign, eighty per 
cent of the people of Mexico never had a look-in in 
determining who should be their governors or what 
their government should be. It is none of my busi- 
ness and it is none of your business, how long they 
take in determining it. It is none of my business 
and it is none of yours how they go about the busi- 
ness. The country is theirs, the government is 
theirs and the liberty, if they can get it, — and God 
speed them in getting it! — is theirs, and so far as 
my influence goes, while I am President, nobody shall 
interfere with it." Between what President Wilson 
has said of the Filipinos and of the Mexicans there 
is to be found the root of statesmanship for Ireland. 
To attempt a lesser statesmanship for Ireland is to 
baulk the Irishman and to afflict the world. For no 
matter how we call this maladjustment " domestic," 
we are relentlessly reminded of its consequences 
whenever the principles of democracy and liberty are 
invoked. This is a world of interwoven histories, 
multiple relationships, complex purposes. If run- 
ning time did not heal and sweeten the wrongs of the 
past, we could not go on living. But when infringe- 
ments on democracy and liberty are written into the 
government of a people, then the fountain-head itself 
is the nurse of pollution, and nothing can heal its 
waters save drastic change. Without such correc- 
tion, relationships all through the world are infected 
and purposes distorted. It is impossible to disguise 
so tragic a presence, to close one's eyes to destructive 
injustice so stubbornly unredeemed. 

[ 24 ] 



PART II 
CAUSES 

Let me speak to the yet unknowing world 
How these things came about: so shall you hear 
Of carnal, bloody and unnatural acts, 
Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters; 
Of deaths put on by cunning and forc'd cause 
And, in this upshot, purposes mistook 
Fall'n on the inventors' heads; all this can I 
Truly deliver. 

Hamlet. 



II 

THE UNWRITTEN VERSION 

AS IT WAS IN THE BEGINNING 

YOU cannot fish and cut bait at the same time. 
This is one of the first economic discoveries that was 
made on the ancient coasts of Ireland. Simple and 
logical people solved this problem by deciding that 
he who fished should cut his own bait. But life is 
neither simple nor logical; and something was soon 
heard about the inequality of man, the duties of 
labor, and the rights of property. 

You cannot eat your fish and have it. This was 
another economic discovery on the Irish coast. 
Simple and logical people supposed that the man 
who ate his fish would expect nothing more. But 
they reckoned without the high devices of capital 
and credit — without wages, or rent, or interest, or 
profit, or other disagreeable factors in the long 
squabble about fish. 

Everything, however, was peaceful at the start. 
In the good old days of slavery men arranged so 
that the lower orders cut bait while the upper classes 
fished — a practical simplification. It was based 
on the principle that the faculty for producing is 
unequal. But the faculty for being " practical " is 
also unequal. Among the slaves there were a few 
disquieting creatures who had the gift of imagina- 

[ 27 ] 



tion. Imagination is the great enemy of practicality. 
It occurred to these souls that, since fishing seemed 
an agreeable employment, cutting bait could not be 
the whole duty of man. This idea possessed its vic- 
tims like a demon, and presented itself in new and 
attractive disguises. A few weak-minded fisher- 
men were inclined to indulge it, but it was contrary 
to the established order. It was pronounced de- 
testable, unreasonable and unscientific by nearly 
every member of the fishing classes. And it was 
rejected by a majority of the slaves themselves. 

These latter slaves had always cut bait. Their 
fathers and grandfathers had cut bait before them. 
They knew nothing of fishing. They felt unequal to 
fishing. Who were they, slimy smelly wretches, 
that they should intrude themselves on men of real 
attainment? They believed that, according to na- 
ture, they were not intended to fish. They argued 
that, though they did not fish themselves, wiser men 
than themselves gave them part of the fish that they 
had caught, and they preferred to go on cutting bait, 
a humble task, but useful, necessary and inevitable. 
How, they asked, could fishing be carried on at all 
unless some one cut bait, and was it fair to ask fine 
fishermen to take up a task so menial? In this con- 
clusion they were applauded by the fishermen, and 
rewarded with an extra sprat. And men came to 
them who never fished themselves, holy men in pet- 
ticoats, and said: " Do not set your mind on fish. 
Fish is the root of all evil. We, who neither fish 
nor cut bait, but live on the little you provide for us, 
we say that pious resignation is the height of phil- 
osophy. At best, fishing is but vanity. Will a fish 
add a cubit to your stature? Nay, nor two fishes. 

[ 28 ] 



The fishermen are no happier than yourselves. 
They lay up fish, but the worms devour it. What 
is fish, in the end, but an earthly possession? Do 
not rail against fortune. There is great comfort 
in cutting bait, if you but cut with a willing heart. 
Therefore, cut bait, and remember that your humble 
fortune is especially dear to providence. Cut bait, 
my children, and recollect that if you are pure of 
heart, all will be added unto you. Thank you for 
the sprat. Could you not spare another, for the 
conversion of the benighted heathen? Thank you 
again. Though it be a small sprat, it is offered 
with a large heart. If you will kneel down, I shall 
give you my blessing. Kiss this hand. God bless 
you, my children. I shall intercede for you with the 
Almighty. Be of good cheer. The meek shall in- 
herit the sprats." 

THE DIVISION OF LABOR 
Meanwhile the discontented slaves were put down 
as great talkers but poor cutters of bait. They did 
not do their share, and could the world go on unless 
every man did his share? Everywhere they were 
frowned upon, and they received the smallest mess 
of fish at the new moon. And when they went home 
to their wives, they had no extra sprat for the stock- 
pot, and none for the man in the petticoat. Some 
of them decided, by the help of their wives, that this 
was a foolish policy. It was better to please the 
fishermen, whose hearts were really in the right 
place, and secure the extra sprats, than to go on 
dreaming of a different world, a world maybe where 
if they tried to fish for themselves their bellies would 
often be empty, and no one to thank, 

[29 ] 



A few of them, however, had fiery wives, who re- 
viled the fishermen and their own husbands, and 
said: " Is that all you get for cutting bait? Why 
don't you fish yourself, and you as clever as the 
world? What is a little rubbish such as that for the 
like of yourself, a big, strapping man that could eat 
it in one mouthful? Go back now and make known 
your wishes, aye, and take hold of a rod yourself 
and split any man's skull who will stop you. The 
sprats are growing smaller with every hour, and my 
heart is broken trying to stay the children. What 
kind of men are you at all, to let those fat greedy- 
guts take away all the great, fine fish, and bringing 
home a few brickeens the like of these, and half of 
them rotten? If it was myself was talking to them, 
I'd give them my mind, and well they'd remember it. 
I'd lay hold of their tackle, and they could strip me 
to the skin before they'd tear me away. Are my 
children to starve for the like of those cormorants, 
and my bones to be worn through my flesh, trying to 
satisfy our crying needs? " 

With these words burning in their ears, the dis- 
contented slaves plodded back to work, and cut bait 
with bitter scorn. And over them was put a sturdy 
fellow, no grandee at all but a slave himself, who 
had cut bait mightily and was rewarded with 
" power." 

" Why don't you do like myself? " he cried, large 
with his own sort of pride. " Let you cut bait with 
fidelity and care, and soon you'll be going around 
like myself, no slave at all but a Free Man, with a 
little pool of your own, maybe, and the right to catch 
sprats after working-hours." 

One or two of them took his words to heart. And 
[ 3o] 



the day they marched home with their own little 
rods, their fiery wives cried for joy, and ran out to 
fetch food and finery. They told their children of 
their father's great sense and wisdom. " Is it give 
in to them he would, and he the notable man ! Pray 
God you take after himself, the pride of them all." 

But there still remained a handful of wretches 
who rejected their lot, and who wished to be free 
fishermen, in their own right. Instead of bargain- 
ing for a little rod of their own, they wished every 
man to have his own rod, his own fishing ground, his 
own undisputed life, or to share all in common, for 
the good of all. And when one of them told his 
hopes to his wife, that wistful creature nodded her 
head. 

" Oh, it's clever they think themselves, them that 
flaunt themselves now, after all their salt tears. 
They were the pity of the world, till their own bellies 
were full. And now, where is misfortune, that they 
should wring their hands? Faith we're fools, my 
good man, that we should be remembering the world, 
and their sorrows so readily cured. But well I know 
yourself. It's not ailing with the hunger you are, 
but the yoke of mankind. But what is that yoke to 
a man without pride? Many wear it that don't 
know it, and many put off their own, to put it on 
another. You wouldn't be easy, and you free itself, 
with all that do be slaving from morn till night. 
Maybe if we were well off ourselves, we'd care no 
more than another. How would we, and we stupe- 
fied with fish?" 

" Fish is a good thing," observed the famished 
slave, with his eyes in the empty pot. 

11 A good thing surely," said his wife, " but when 
[ 3i ] 



you look like that you put me in mind of a shark." 

" I'm as hungry as a shark," he answered with a 
laugh. 

" Well, it's small charity you'll find in an empty 
pot. Maybe it's mad we are to be thinking of the 
rights of all." 

"Mad indeed! Sometimes I wonder I'm not 
raging the world, the like of a lion or a wolf or a 
beast of prey. 'Tis one and the same thing, to be 
the slave of your master or the slave of your hun- 
ger. If you don't give in to one, you'll give in to 
the other. But how could I be crawling now, and 
I after saying what I said? Ah, it's too proud I 
am for a man that must eat." 

" Is it proud you call yourself, and you pining 
only to be free? No one will see you crawl, my 
honest man, or hear a sorry word from your lips. 
Let you be off now, and find others to take sides with 
you. Whatever's the outcome, you must fight or 
starve." 

" Some that do love to work," said the man as 
he stood up, " do say it's only lazy men do be talk- 
ing of freedom. Sure the fishermen do be slaving 
itself, they say, and it's right and proper to be at 
it night and morn." 

" Aye, the poor creatures," quoth his wife, press- 
ing him to the door. " The fishermen make great 
hardship of their own work, but who sees them 
changing places? It's the like of those humble peo- 
ple the fishermen do love. Always taking the rem- 
nants, and they worn to a shred. They're the model 
kind, no doubt, and they'll do what they're told. 
But you may thank God you didn't marry a mouse 
the like of that, or you'd be flying in the hills." 

[32 ] 



THE COMING OF THE DANES 

And do you suppose the free fishermen, who doled 
out the sprats, were in love with threshing the 
waters? It wasn't long before they saw that if they 
could catch fish without cutting bait, they could have 
fish without catching them. Soon they multiplied 
the slaves with the rods, taking most for themselves, 
and started building long galleys out of timber from 
the woods. Then shortly they were off in high 
ships, armed with javelins and shields, looking for 
a world where fish can be had without drudgery. 
And they found that fish in other parts belonged to 
free men like themselves. Chieftains they called 
themselves now, and they picked out the best bait- 
cutters to work their high ships and long galleys for 
them, and leap out at other bait-cutters in distant 
places, and cut off their heads with sharpened 
swords. It was necessary to do that, to have fish 
without drudgery. 

The poor slaves at home heard fine tales of these 
exploits. They got tired cutting bait, and grew wild 
to cut heads. Among them went some of the 
wretched slaves, glad to find a new task more befit- 
ting a man. They did not mind the havoc they 
played in distant places. Their fishermen told them 
that these other fishermen were cruel and treacher- 
ous barbarians, who would let no one fish only them- 
selves, and who ought to be put down. So put down 
they were for the time being, and the side that won 
took all the fish that was cured in the distant places, 
and for a time all had reward for their pains, ex- 
cept the men whose heads were severed from their 
bodies. 

[ 33 ] 



But when they returned to their own home, an 
awful sight was to meet their eyes, for while they 
were gone in their high ships, other strong men of 
the sea had ridden into their harbor and stolen their 
own fish, and made free with their wives, and de- 
stroyed their tackle and their homes, and put their 
slaves to the sword. Only a few were escaped, into 
the woods — and among them some of the discon- 
tented ones who had always wanted to fish. At this 
sorrowful sight, the chieftains took a dreadful oath. 
They called together all their sons and overseers 
and slaves, and gave power to the best among them 
to arm and drill, and swore mighty vengeance in the 
name of all alike. And all but a few of the discon- 
tented ones seized upon their arms, and made cause 
with their chieftains, and began to hate the treach- 
erous barbarians, who had caused all their ills. 
The chieftains gave heavy shining swords to some of 
these rebellious slaves and named them captains or 
officers, and only a few of them were left without 
any swords or spears, for fear they wouldn't know 
how rightly to use them. 

THE END OF THE CLANS 
All through the wars the same things happened. 
Each time the chieftains won, they had their belly- 
ful. Each time they lost, they took dreadful oaths. 
Meanwhile, the whole duty of fishing fell to a 
quieter class of men and if they said aught about 
having to do nothing but fish and cut bait they were 
goaded by the chieftain's spear and told they must 
do their duty in this world, for all had to be pinched 
on account of the wars. But in spite of the double 
need for fishing, so that brave men could sail hither 

[ 34 ] 



and thither with spear and torch, there were still 
men who did not choose to cut bait or to cut heads, 
and who hated the chieftains as much as the foreign- 
ers, and sometimes more. They did not believe the 
foreigners were cruel and treacherous barbarians, 
but only slaves like themselves, except for a few 
swaggering chieftains who wanted the world. They 
did not want the world. But they wanted their 
share of their toils, not to spend it in high ships and 
bright shields, but to live according to their own 
flaming imagination. And when the holy men in 
petticoats heard their murmurings the big majority- 
cursed them, and put their blessing on the chieftains, 
who gave them silks and chalices instead of sprats, 
and ounces of silver and ounces of gold. When 
they were old men the chieftains often retired among 
the holy men in black coats, and gave themselves up 
to penance, for they had bad dreams of their gory 
deeds, and their high ships swimming in blood. 
Their penance was a beautiful sight to behold, after 
a lusty life, and gave great edification. They were 
mightier in their penance than a slave in his purity, 
won to God after a hot career of sin. The slaves 
bowed before these venerable chieftains, and went 
on with the fishing. 

THE NORMANS ARRIVE 

But there was trouble in store for all, for the 
gentle could no more be contented than the simple, 
and fell out among themselves. The wife of one 
of them lost her heart to another chieftain, a man 
of fire and mettle, and he bore her from her hus- 
band like a hostage of war. To get back his wife, 
though she hated the sight of him, this chieftain 

[ 35 ] 



went over the seas and returned with a new batch of 
chieftains, great marauders and fighting men; and 
when these foreign warriors found how easy it was 
to cope with chieftains discordant in themselves, they 
turned on all alike, those that sought them and those 
that fought them, and slew them right and left with 
new instruments that none had knowledge of but 
themselves. And when they conquered, they took 
care to be friends among themselves, and to bind 
all to the fishing for their own use and gain. 

So in the end it was the foreign chieftains who 
had most say as to the fishing, and they swept the 
slaves into the woods to starve, without a single 
sprat to eat, only berries and grass. Then were the 
discontented ones perplexed. For had not their 
own chieftains given them a little fish, though it was 
rotten? 

Here they were together a common herd, chiefs 
and priests among them, tamed like robins in the 
snow. Their high nobles, men who were used to 
castles and grand banquets and tasselled pillows in 
their bed, hunted for nuts like gossoons, and scooped 
water in their hands. And the priests that chanted 
songs in the lofty abbeys and chapels said mass un- 
der dripping boughs and knelt in the mould. Their 
chiefs and priests were flailed before their eyes. 
The one roof was over them all, and the one for- 
tune afflicted them. To see the high brought low, 
and foreigners revel in the land, quenched the anger 
in the hearts of the discontented. Their wrath 
against the foreigners outshone their wrath against 
the chieftains like sunlight robbing a candle of its 
flame. And they banded all together, to harry the 
new settlers in their comings and goings. 

[ 36 ] 



THE CONFISCATIONS 

It was long they were hunted, in terror of their 
lives, seeking out caves and dingles and lone crevices 
in the hills, and peering out at prancing horsemen 
from the screen of the woods. All were alike in 
these days, the one bond between them, and that a 
thrall. The holy men were bare to the knees, and 
they daren't appear in the open world, in fear of 
wrath and persecution. Proud foreign men stalked 
up and down the land, hardly fishing themselves, but 
crying vengeance on all. It was long before the 
old class of men began to fight back, one by one, the 
hair matted in their eyes, and nothing on them but 
the skin of a dead sheep. The foreign chieftains 
twitted them with their empty hands and empty 
bellies, crawling out into the sun with only a stave 
for their defence. Weeds grew in ploughed fields 
in those days, and burdocks and thistles ate up the 
earth. And the hearts of men were a waste like 
the land. They were pitiful men before the world. 
After raging war from year's end to year's end, it 
was the chiefs themselves who lastly were proud to 
be let cut bait at all, and their wives proud to have 
them. And the discontented slaves hovered in the 
woods, catching a trout with their hands, or snaring 
a rabbit at the dawn of day. 

But as time went on, the new chieftains devised 
the old plan. They gave back a little fishing rod 
here and a little fishing rod there, and they set the 
clever among the simple to keep account of the rest. 
And that was the cause of new perplexity. In the 
days that all were hunted alike, every man worked 
with every other man, and one watched while an- 
other slept. But now it was a scramble to see who'd 

[ 37 ] 



be taken back. It was men fighting among each 
other to see who'd cut bait, and the men who held 
out to be let fish in the old way were laughed to 
scorn. Whether you fished or cut bait, it was the 
same thing. Away up at the top of all were great 
nobles in castles, men who never soiled their hands 
with common toil, fine idle men who used mincing 
words, and spoke about government and order, and 
gave no one the time of day, and swam the sea in 
ships that had silken sails. And next to them, for- 
eign chieftains as well, were the strong rulers of 
the people. These never did a hand's turn either, 
only by way of fun, but rode hither and thither, tell- 
ing the fishers how to fish, and the bait-cutters how 
to bait. Deep new-fangled dodges they had, nets 
and fancy hooks and colored bits of tin that looked 
like flies, and they laughed at the old ways of cut- 
ting bait. " God help the creatures," said they, 
" it's in the bogs they were born, where you fish 
with a berry on a thread. It's a poor ignorant class 
of men we have to deal with. We can't trust them 
with our fancy contrivances." And when the fish 
were caught, they cured it all for themselves, except 
a little they left to the fishermen, and a few handfuls 
for the laboring men, and they gave the big balance 
to the high-up noble people, with the extra sprats 
for a new kind of foreign holy men who came over 
the sea. The discontented slaves couldn't tell what 
was in it. More fish were caught than ever before, 
but the land was a land of horrors. Nobles boast- 
ing and carousing at one end, and at the other skele- 
tons creeping to and fro, as quiet as ghosts, and the 
eyes burning in their heads. But when they whis- 
pered it over in twos and threes, and bent their 

[38] 



thoughts in desperation, the strong rulers heard tell 
of their doings, and cut off their share. " Don't be 
annoying us with your mischief," they said, " or we 
may be compelled to be harsh." 

THE NATIVES REBEL 

It was a sorrowful land, where so few were in 
ease and so many in want, and the people's hearts 
were broken with the strong rulers up and down. 
If they didn't fish, they starved; but the more they 
caught the more they had to give in. It was like 
baling the ocean with a cup. " We're slaves, so we 
are," said the old chieftains themselves; "it's the 
pity of God we ever asked those robbers to come 
over. But how can we get rid of them now, and 
they cemented in our forts? Has every man among 
them a heart of stone? Look at their innocent 
children, and they smiling in the turreted windows. 
Little they know the villainy of their murdering 
kin. They're foreign to the bone, when all is said 
and done, and no hope of them at all. Let us all 
band together now, and destroy these raving 
wolves." 

" Is it fight them we will, and they armed to the 
eyes? " 

" No, but kill them and they riding on the roads, 
or standing on their steps itself. How else will we 
dislodge them, and they glued to the land? Didn't 
we offer to fight them, and get swept by their can- 
non? Is it with naked hands we will rise against 
their murdering steel? " 

At these glowering words, the discontented men 
took heart, and rightly. And the only ones who 
cared nothing about all this talk were sturdy for- 

[ 39 ] 



eign fellows who used to fish for the nobles, but who 
had saved up from the start, and at last paid for 
their freedom with fish. A few of the old stock, 
tried to do the same, but in most cases the price was 
too high. And this made them doubly desperate. 
But their own holy men in black coats were back, 
in the land, taking what sprats they could get, sing- 
ing hymns in bare white-washed chapels, and thank- 
ing God for his mercies. They thought no more of 
the wet woods where they were chased, and grassy 
banks for altars. " Is it black murder you will 
commit, and ye back fishing again? Let you ask 
for justice, and God will reward your patience and 
virtue. What is it is in you, to make you slaughter 
your fellow-man? Cannot ye be contented to work 
out your salvation in the holy way appointed? 
How can we bring these stout foreigners to God, if 
ye make their lives uneasy and perplexed? The 
ways of the Almighty are strange, but His mercy is 
manifold. Are we not the best friends you ever 
had? Will you go against our advices? When 
you were chieftains in the land, didn't we soothe 
down the slaves for ye, and keep your property se- 
cure ? Is this the way ye pay us ? Help us to drive 
out those black devils that have seized the old ab- 
beys on us, and put us back where we belong, and 
all will be well. Aren't those false holy men tak- 
ing the bit out of your mouth? We'll educate you 
and take care of you, and give you the right advices. 
Is it in white-washed chapels we must pray, and 
those idle rogues in our great churches, with their 
bastards at their knees? Be you contented with 
your own lot, and join manfully in getting justice 
for ourselves. Our faithful flock, follow where we 

[ 40] 






lead, like the good sheep that you are. Don't go 
raging for a little temporal power that may prove 
your destruction, but attend to your duties and be 
regular with your sprats. It's discontent has the 
world where it is, and the mad desire for upheaval 
and change. Once we dislodge those villainous 
usurpers that have stolen our chapels, you will be 
able to pray at your ease in fine lofty buildings and 
store up rewards for yourselves in the life that is to 
come." 

UNDER THE UNION 

Most of the old stock paid heed to these words, 
and started to put out the other holy men that came 
over the sea. In the meantime the nobles took so 
much fish in the lean years that the slaves died by 
the hundred, and the thousand, and the ten thou- 
sand, and the hundred thousand, and the million. 
The discontented slaves that were left after this 
trouble kept their minds to themselves, but they were 
thinking how to dislodge the great nobles up above, 
and the powerful rulers that lived behind high walls, 
and the men in black coats who weren't holy men at 
all but stayed awake in little barracks at every cross- 
roads. The discontented ones began to haunt the 
woody glens again, but it wasn't rabbits they tried 
to snare this time, but solitary grandees riding airily 
by. And soon it was the free who were slaves in 
their castles, and the slaves who were free in their 
crannies, and the foreign chie 'tains were sick of 
being trapped on the road, and meeting bloody death 
in the bye-ways. 

After a while the strong rulers put their heads 
together, and they made a new deal. What they 

[ 4i ] 



liked was the sturdy fellows who paid for their free- 
dom in fish. Next, they liked the men who tried to 
buy their freedom, and who gave a good share for 
their rods. What they hated was the fellows who 
rotted and died. But these grew so many that they 
had to take action, for the sake of peace. The old 
stock were to be let fish again in the old way, after 
they promised to give a portion to the nobles, for a 
long term of years. The little share for the nobles 
was just to get rid of them, a trifle in the end. 
There were to be no slaves any more at all, they 
said, all free men cutting their own bait, and fishing 
at will. But it was only the foreign chieftains, they 
said, who could be trusted to make rules and regu- 
lations in a land so discontented. The strong rulers 
would have to busy themselves here and there, to 
secure freedom in the land. 

The sturdy fellows who were put in place by the 
foreign rulers were glad of this rule, but the old 
stock were sorry. They looked to the fishing in 
high glee, but they wanted no foreign rulers. The 
discontented men did not know what to think. 
When they came to ask for their fishing rods at the 
time appointed, many were held back, and there 
weren't enough to go around. And they found that 
every man had to have fish put by before he would 
be given a rod all his own. 

" It was hard for me to save any fish out of the 
little I got," said one of the men with empty hands. 

"Hard, is it?" said one of the sturdy fellows. 
"And how did I save? It's an ignorant and help- 
less man you are, I'm thinking, with your hardships 
and all. It's weak you are, and wanting in charac- 
ter, to be complaining of men who catch a thousand 

[ 42 ] 



to your one. Sure it's right you should be a slave, 
if you don't do your share of work. Don't you 
know that men have great tackle and appliances this 
day, and that such men can catch more fish in a min- 
ute than you'd catch in a year? If it's freedom you 
want, let you save fish and buy it, and not be begging 
like a tramp that's too lazy to work." 

Home to his wife went the discontented slave 
with the secret of freedom. 

" Now if I was a smart and adaptable man, God 
help me, and a steady man like themselves," he 
said, " I'd be just as good as they are, and able to 
hold my own. Sure it's right I should be a slave, 
if I don't earn a big share of fish." 

" Is that the way it is, indeed? " asked his wife. 
" Then if that's the way you think, what sense is in 
talking of being free? What started you on justice 
at all, with your new talk of taking all you can grab ? 
Musha, you have my heart broken with your non- 
sense. Did I ever put you up to tricks in the old 
days to fill the pot? " 

" Never in the world." 

" Did I ever tell you to bring home a great share, 
in spite of them all? " 

" Well, no, you didn't." 

" And who told you 'twas wilful and lazy you 
were, not to grab all you could, but some old chief- 
tainy fellow who wanted you to act like himself? " 

" Hold on now yourself! Did I ever hang over 
the empty pot, and refuse to go work? " 

" You didn't, my dear, for it's well you knew I 
wouldn't let you. Always I was wishful to have 
you work, fish your fair share, and cut bait as well. 
But did I ever say 'twas the man who grabs the 

[ 43 ] 



most should be the free man, be he foreign or 
homely, gentle or simple, by new rule or old? Did 
I ever spur you to send other men to work, and have 
you loll at home at your ease, like a duke in his 
castle? If you were ignorant itself, isn't it a com- 
mon hardship it would be, and no cause for priva- 
tion? Did I ever hold back on the poor helpless 
children, though we went hungry ourselves? Did 
you ever let them go wanting, though you went out 
of the house with yOur belly tightened to your spine? 
Many's the woman would have starved the children 
to feed you, but is it starve the creatures I would, 
and they without strength or wile? Was it heading 
for the great castles we were, that we should grab 
night and day, and give thanks to none? Many a 
woman sat on that stool and was as wise as Solomon 
himself about the manner of life. Live in a castle, 
and you're free, they said. If you can't live in a 
castle, let you rule for one who does. If you can't 
rule for one who does, let you fish to catch all. If 
you can't fish, let you cut more bait than the others, 
and win your way to the top. If you can't cut bait, 
you may starve and welcome ! Aye, it's willing they 
were to see people starve, and lay blame on all who 
didn't grab like the rest. Aye, we're all grabbers, 
they said, whether we be grabbing over the counters 
or at the fairs, or on plates during mass. Didn't 
you grab himself, they said, when you were wither- 
ing a virgin? We all grab, they said, and more 
fools if we don't. And they made out that we were 
only jealous of the fisherman, when we spoke of 
justice and the like of that. Maybe it was jealous 
you were, after all, and not fit to do your share? " 
" Well you know I did my share, and did it with- 
[ 44] 



out reward. If it was jealous I was, I'd be in a 
high place myself, taking the whip to poor men, 
and blaming them for being lazy." 

" Well, how do we know that it isn't laziness is 
back of it all?" 

" Aye, that's what the strong rulers say, and they 
making much of government. Sure I know nothing 
of government. It's the high science of all. I lis- 
ten to them now, with all their fine rules. I must 
cut a great share of bait, they say, because I'm a 
lazy man, and then they'll be kind to me. They'll 
cure me when I'm sick, and employ me when I'm 
idle, and support me when I'm old. But isn't it 
the grabbers always had the government, and if 
they pension me itself, mustn't I cut bait a long 
life-time, that they may reap the reward? I'm no 
lazy man, God knows, for what is a lazy man but a 
grabber, be he rich or poor? But don't I look to 
be lazy, in the sight of men who own the big ma- 
chines and have a claim on every fish, before it is 
spawned? " 

" Well, what if you do, itself? You always made 
out you wanted to be free, and now you want to be 
using a lot of queer machinery, though it's the men 
who own the machinery are taking the fish, and not 
yourself at all. If it's machinery you want, and 
not freedom, fight for it and welcome. But you're 
cutting bait just the same, though you be using a 
great machine. And it's eating fish without earning 
it those great men are, though they own machines 
itself. What difference is in it, if you grab with 
your hands, or you grab with a machine? You're 
as big a grabber as ever, though you work night and 
day." 

[ 45 ] 



" It's a power of words you're talking, but I'm 
tormented to understand you. In the old days we 
knew our own minds. There was common robbery 
before our eyes, and not a man to disguise it. One 
set of us was slaves, and another set free, and we 
wanted to see all made free, to live out our own 
lives. But it's different this day, with a new great 
class of men in the world, that have us all by the 
heels. In the old days, which of us made the fish 
in the sea? None of us made it, only nature itself, 
and we took from nature what we needed to live. 
And I was supposed to take enough for yourself and 
the children, and the old man by the hob, lest any 
of us starve. But that wouldn't do the big fellows. 
Sure it's like sparrows we were after a while, fight- 
ing over the same worm, and the biggest one getting 
the biggest. And then the big fellows made ma- 
chines that could catch a million in a minute, and if 
it's free to fish we were itself, we couldn't beat the 
machine. And then, do you mind, they took our 
fish and gave us tokens, and the more fish was caught 
in the world, the less any one of them was worth. 
And when it came to salting them or hauling them, 
the same curse was in it. They own everything in 
the world, and it's by their leave we live itself, let 
alone walk the roads. Maybe it's better out of the 
country we are, but I hear it's the same wherever 
you go. It's all grabbed up, and there's nothing for 
the naked new-born child but what his father 
grabbed already, or what the grabbers have a mind 
to let him earn." 

" And what would we leave our own country for, 
in the name of God? Is it like the fox we are, 
driven to hide in the furze? " 

[ 46 ] 



MORE REBELLION 

But when the discontented man spoke of freedom 
abroad, the people made out that all devilment was 
due to foreign rule. " We must fight again," they 
said, " it's foreign rule is the curse. We were all 
slaves together, harried in the woods, and we'll be 
slaves till the end unless we fight. Stand by your 
leaders, good men, and soon the old stock will be 
free in the land." 

The unhappy wretch was mystified. Well he 
knew the high-up noble people, and he rejoiced at 
their downfall. But wasn't it the home people who 
used to have him cutting bait, and there plenty 
of fish in the sea? Still, he took heart at the 
thought of freedom, and started drilling in the bye- 
ways and the woods, with the thought of freedom in 
his soul. 

And when he told his wife the new turn of things 
she smiled a thin smile. 

" So we're all to have our rights! Glory be to 
God, the fine men that's living these days, with the 
end of all trouble and care. See what's in the pot, 
my darling man. I'm a little faint with the news." 

" The pot is empty." 

" Look in it again, dear. It can't be empty in 
times the like of this." 

" Is it tormenting me you are? Is it the whole 
world changed you want, between day and dark? 
How would it be full, and foreign rule in the land? " 

" Don't scowl at me the like of that, frightening 
your poor wife. How can I tell what's in your 
mind, and you off drilling in the woods, terrifying the 
poor birds with your woodeny gun. It's only think- 

[47 ] 



ing they were so mad about you that they might be 
after filling the pot." 

" Who's mad about me, I'd like to know, and I 
friendless only for my neighbors? " 

" Who's mad about you? Isn't it craving to get 
you justice they are, the leaders in the land? " 

" Aye, it's freeing the nation some of them are, 
and much too busy to bother with the likes of me. 
I tell you this is the time we'll fight like men. 
We'll — " 

" Fight, indeed. It's well I know you'll fight, 
and leave me here to myself, with my sorrow and 
sense. A ' free nation,' God help us, and your own 
chieftains the stern taskmasters in the land. I hear 
them with their talk about foreign rulers and the 
rest. And what voice will they give you, I wonder, 
in the rule that is to come? The strong men go 
prancing up and down today, and they fat up to the 
eyes, but they tell us that foreign rule has them de- 
molished, and we're lucky to be let live. Is it any- 
thing different we'll get from the old stock, in the 
end of all? We're the sparrows that can't fall to 
earth, a single one of us, without a sparrow-hawk 
falling on top of us." 

" I'm afraid you're growing bitter with the weight 
of your cares. Aren't we all the one people? 
Won't we be a free nation? " 

" Yes, we're all the one people, indeed, so long 
as you're contented with an empty pot. Sometimes 
I do be wondering if it's in this world you belong at 
all, or some fairy place of your own. Once I was 
like yourself, with great faith in our own stock, and 
believing they had justice in their minds. But it's 
strange the double meanings of the simplest words. 

[ 48 ] 



Our justice is a share in toil and reward. But their 
justice is the bargain they drive, and making you 
live up to the bargain. They preach freedom for 
us all, but they only act it for themselves. It's men 
of our own blood that do be grabbing more, because 
we're grabbing less. A free nation, in throth, with 
every man rivalling every other man, and flourish- 
ing chieftains of our own." 

" Maybe we'll have rules of our own, that'll get 
us justice for all. There's no hope in those foreign 
blackguards. I'll stand by my own, and fight for 
freedom against all." 

" And what about cutting bait, I'd like to know? 
You've forgot your old story about fighting for your 
rights." 

" I'll have my rights when we're free." 

" No, my gallant man, you'll be just as far from 
justice as you were before." 

" Perhaps there's no such thing as justice. God 
knows what put it in my head. Sometimes it's like 
a dream a million years old. I'll be content if the 
country is free." 

" Well, then, I won't be content. Before the 
country was born, I was born. We'll be all one peo- 
ple when we've the same justice in mind. Let you 
free the nation, and welcome, but remember your 
own words. It's justice I'm dreaming of, and my 
dream is a million years old." 



[49] 



Ill 

AN ECONOMIC APPROACH 

NOT SO SIMPLE 

1 HERE are still people in England and America 
who hold that parliament is the satisfactory instru- 
ment, not of a governing class, but of the whole peo- 
ple. A fixed idea like this precludes political wisdom. 
The first and fundamental fact about government is 
its reference to a governing class, with the interest 
of that class providing a bias. The bias is not al- 
ways conscious or constant, but it is prevalent. 
When Peter Pan soars upward the children in the 
theatre look wonderingly on him. He flies! In 
the fairy tale of politics there is a good deal of this 
flying by the aid of invisible wires. The interests 
of property are not unremittingly selfish and poli- 
ticians are not unremittingly obedient to them, but 
it is well to remember that the continuance of poli- 
ticians, their place in the governing scheme, responds 
with great fidelity to existing economic power. 

Nothing is so simple, I admit, as my Irishman 
seems to think. He knows poverty and hates it. 
He has the first real requirement of the reformer 
but for the solution of poverty his notions are not 
organized. And it is not so easy to organize them. 
We have, for example, the word of Mr. Graham 
Wallas that thirty years ago he and Bernard Shaw 

[ 5o] 



and Sidney Webb and Sidney Olivier formed a read- 
ing circle at Hampstead to study the Marxian eco- 
nomics. These men had the same sympathies as 
Karl Marx and they expected to agree with him, 
but from the beginning they found themselves criti- 
cizing him. They ended by not only disagreeing 
with him but by disagreeing in some essential con- 
siderations among themselves. 

There was, to start with, the Ricardian law of 
rent. " It was on this point," says Mr. Wallas, 
" that we first definitely disagreed with Marx. In- 
stead of taking surplus value in the lump, we divided 
it into the three ' rents ' of land, capital, and ability, 
and faced the fact that, if he worked with the worst 
land, tools, and brains, ' in cultivation,' the worst- 
paid laborer might be producing no more wealth 
than he consumed. This led us to abandon ' ab- 
stract labor ' as the basis of value, and to adopt 
Jevons's conception of value as fixed by the point 
where ' marginal effort ' coincided with ' marginal 
utility.' " 

Here you have the sort of thing that really makes 
a needy man pause. If Lord Selborne and Lord 
Lansdowne abandoned " abstract labor " as the 
basis of value, he would take their pained decision 
under advisement. But the disinterestedness of the 
Hampstead group compels a different attitude. It 
holds up any poor man who has an open mind. 

" MORE AND LESS " 
An apparent laxity comes with sophistication. 
" It was this rejection of Marxism," continues Mr. 
Wallas, " which made possible our partial ' perme- 
ation ' of liberal and other non-socialist political or- 

[5i ] 



ganizations. Instead of looking on ' capitalism ' 
and ' exploitation ' as a single fact to be destroyed 
by the shock-tactics of class-war and forcible revo- 
lution, we came to see the economic advantages 
which individual men enjoyed by inheriting or ac- 
quiring land or bonds or brains or training as mat- 
ters of more and less. If a Liberal Chancellor of 
the Exchequer taxed land or unearned income, or 
an educationalist worked to improve the primary or 
technical schools, or a hygienist invented schemes of 
housing, we accepted his work, not as a ' palliative ' 
but as an actual step toward our ideal." 

So the hard suspicion of regular politics is aban- 
doned. 

So, in addition, on the historic side, " the narrow 
and mechanical reference of all human actions to 
economic motives. We never supposed that all po- 
litical alliances and party quarrels, or all wars or 
sexual customs or religions were due to the single 
desire to make money. Finally, we never believed 
in an inevitable, automatic, and ' scientific ' process 
by which a social revolution would come of itself. 
That theory is apt to present itself to the young 
reformer, as a reason why he should trust to his 
own automatic impulses, should read and think when 
he feels inclined to, should speak with such eloquence 
as comes from the exaltation of the moment, and 
should attend committees as long as they interest 
him. During ten years of constant intimacy we 
learnt (imperfectly enough in my own case) from 
Shaw's exacting passion for artistic perfection and 
Webb's almost incredible force and industry, that 
one could only get things done in politics by a steady 
and severe effort of the will." 

[ 52 ] 



WHERE POWER RESIDES 

The subservience of politics to wealth is a crude 
idea but I do not think that any Fabian would deny 
the harshness and wilfulness of most economic mo- 
tive, and the strong drive of economic power. Be- 
sides, privilege has not waited for advocates till the 
coming of modern Germany. The conflict that un- 
derlies politics would be much more benign if there 
were not a vigorous doctrine of privilege. You 
can find it fairly openly substantiated in the hand- 
book of the ruling class, and among these hand- 
books perhaps the most reputable is Walter Bage- 
hot's English Constitution. About fifty years ago, 
in 1867, Bagehot gave the governing class in Eng- 
land much sagacious advice, and he based it on a 
clear discrimination against the democracy. His 
opinion of " the lower orders of mankind " he made 
no attempt to conceal. He believed them inimical 
and dangerous, and his chief object was to tell the 
governing class the best way to handle them. Can- 
dor he loved. As he said shrewdly in another con- 
nection, " the worst families are those in which the 
members never really speak their minds to one an- 
other; they maintain an atmosphere of unreality, 
and everyone always lives in an atmosphere of sup- 
pressed ill-feeling." For this reason he spoke very 
frankly of the class which, in his opinion, was made 
to be governed. 

Bagehot had a strong belief in hereditary aris- 
tocracy. The most certain fact in human nature, he 
argued, is the unequal development of the human 
race. " The lower orders, the middle orders, are 
still, when tried by what is the standard of the edu- 

[ 53 J 



cated ' ten thousand,' narrow-minded, unintelligent, 
incurious. It is useless to pile up abstract words. 
Those who doubt should go out into their kitchens. 
Let an accomplished man try what seems to him most 
obvious, most certain, most palpable in intellectual 
matters, upon the housemaid and the footman, and 
he will find that what he says seems unintelligible, 
confused and erroneous — that his audience think 
him mad and wild when he is speaking what is in his 
own sphere of thought the dullest platitude of cau- 
tious soberness." 

It is interesting to think that at that very moment, 
in one of Bagehot's pliocene kitchens, the dubious 
reader would have encountered the mother of that 
eminent member of the reigning " ten thousand," 
Mr. H. G. Wells. Much of Mr. Wells's bristling 
mind may be traced to his consciousness that he 
had to work up from what Bagehot called " the 
tertiary strata of human progress," where, as in the 
bowels of a mountain, things are so unintelligible 
and confused. But it is only fair to quote Bagehot 
as to the possible exception to his theory. We have 
his estimate of Lincoln. " The notion of employing 
a man of unknown smallness at a crisis of unknown 
greatness is to our minds simply ludicrous. Mr. 
Lincoln, it is true, happened to be a man, if not of 
eminent ability, yet of eminent justness. There was 
an inner depth of Puritan nature which came out 
under suffering, and was very attractive. But suc- 
cess in a lottery is no argument for lotteries. What 
were the chances against a person of Lincoln's ante- 
cedents, elected as he was, proving to be what he 
was?" 

[54] 



THE IGNORANT MULTITUDE 

With these views as to the masses, low people who 
come into the world without good letters of intro- 
duction, it was seemly that Bagehot should sanctify 
economic privilege, should regard a political com- 
bination of the lower classes, " as such and for their 
own objects," " an evil of the first magnitude." He 
was " exceedingly afraid of the ignorant multitude 
of the new constituencies." He reprehended very 
severely those statesmen who " raise questions which 
will excite the lower orders of mankind." He 
deprecated those issues " which will bind the poor as 
a class together." But he strongly advocated the 
binding of the rich together, " to guide the new 
voters in the exercise of the franchise; to guide them 
quietly, and without saying what they are doing, but 
still to guide them." 

To this end Bagehot urged the House of Lords 
to look kindly on the plutocracy. Rank, he said, 
has a market value. The plutocrats possess mate- 
rial distinctions, " they rush to worship those who 
possess the immaterial distinctions." " Nothing 
can be more politically useful than such homage, if 
it be skilfully used; no folly can be idler than to 
repel and reject it." He urged that the House of 
Commons mainly represents the plutocracy, the 
Lords represent the aristocracy. " The main inter- 
est of both these classes is now identical, which is 
to prevent or to mitigate the rule of uneducated 
members." He insisted that the Lords' " plain in- 
terest is to make friends of the plutocracy, and to be 
the chiefs of it, and not to wish to oppose the Com- 
mons where that plutocracy rules." And he added, 

[55] 



with a touch of British brusqueness, " sensible men 
of substantial means are what we wished to be ruled 
by." 

As economic power shifts, so political power will 
shift. Walter Bagehot gave the Lords fair warn- 
ing that the house which represented landlordism 
had to incorporate industry or to yield. It looks at 
present as if the hand which had been retaining 
wealth has lost its grip on the hand which is acquir- 
ing it. The House of Lords is regarded as a com- 
fortable debating society, with beautiful red-leather 
cushions. But the radicalism of the attack on the 
Lords was scarcely the great surging of a free peo- 
ple. It is evident that government, which should be 
a wise cooperation for general benefit, remains to a 
considerable degree within the jealous custody of 
sensible men of substantial means. Since this is 
government in its common aspect, it follows that the 
people at large can hope for very little from govern- 
ment so long as they do not consult their own eco- 
nomic motives and force those motives into the po- 
litical resultant. 

THE ANSWER 

This, you may feel, is the way Lenine and 
Trotzky came to upset government. But the class 
struggle is not the myth of radicals. It has the 
assent of the most detached and scrupulous minds. 
Lord Acton, for example, had no hesitation in recog- 
nizing the struggle. Not that he derided the 
House of Lords. " The more perfect the repre- 
sentative system," he said, " the more necessary is 
some other aid to stability. Six or seven such aids 
have been devised, and we unite three of them in 

[ 56] 



our House of Lords — primogeniture, established 
church, and an independent judiciary. Its note is 
Constancy — the wish to carry into the future the 
things of the past, the capacity to keep aloof from 
the strife and aims of the passing hour." But ter- 
rible as Lord i\cton said it would be to " sweep 
away " the House of Lords he was too honest to 
obscure its real character. " The House of Lords 
feels a stronger duty towards its eldest sons than 
towards the masses of ignorant, vulgar and greedy 
people. Therefore, except under very perceptible 
pressure, it always resists measures aimed at doing 
good to the poor. It has been almost always in the 
wrong — sometimes from prejudice and fear and 
miscalculation, still oftener from instinct and self- 
preservation. Generally it does only a temporary 
injury, and that is its plea for existence. But the 
injury may be irreparable. And if we have mani- 
fest suffering, degradation, and death on one side, 
and the risk of a remodelled senate on the other, the 
certain evil outweighs the contingent danger." 

Since the economic status of the Irish is the pivot 
of Irish politics, I beg leave to dwell on the conclu- 
sions of a liberal like Acton. " I am not sure that 
there is any quite available and compendious answer 
to the two reproaches of setting the poor against 
the rich, and of giving power to those least fit for 
it," he wrote to Mary Gladstone in 1881. " There 
lurks in each an atom of inevitable truth; and the 
sententious arguments which serve to dazzle people 
at elections may generally be met by epigrams just 
as sparkling and just as sound on the other side." 
But what has the candid liberal to say in favor of 
giving votes to ignorant people and urging needy 

[ 57] 



people to combine against the rich? Acton referred 
to the current campaign. " It was necessary to 
bring home to the constituencies, to needy and igno- 
rant men, the fact that Society, the wealthy ruling 
class, that supported our late Mazarin [Disraeli] 
in clubs and drawing-rooms, was ready to spend the 
treasure and the blood of the people in defence of 
an infamous tyranny [Turkey], to gratify pride, the 
love of authority, and the lust of power. Nearly 
the same situation arose in Ireland, and in other 
questions not so urgent. Secondly, as to Democ- 
racy, it is true that masses of new electors are ut- 
terly ignorant. . . . The answer is that you cannot 
make an omelette without breaking eggs — ■ that poli- 
tics are not made up of artifices only, but of truths, 
and that truths have to be told. ... If there is a 
free contract, in open market, between capital and 
labor, it cannot be right that one of the two con- 
tracting parties should have the making of the laws, 
the management of the conditions, the keeping of 
the peace, the administration of justice, the distri- 
bution of taxes, the control of expenditure, in its 
own hands exclusively. It is unjust that all these 
securities, all these advantages, should be all on the 
side that has least urgent need of them, that has 
least to lose. . . . That is the flesh and blood argu- 
ment. 

11 That is why Reform, full of questions of 
expediency and policy in detail, is, in the gross, not 
a question of expediency or of policy at all; and 
why some of us regard our opponents as men who 
should imagine sophisms to avoid keeping promises, 
paying debts, or speaking truths." 

[ 58] 



PRIVILEGE ABUSED 

The aristagogue like Bagehot did not sway Acton. 
11 The fact is that education, intelligence, wealth, are 
a security against certain faults of conduct, not 
against errors of policy. There is no error so 
monstrous that it fails to find defenders among the 
ablest men. Imagine a congress of eminent celebri- 
ties, such as More, Bacon, Grotius, Pascal, Crom- 
well, Bossuet, Montesquieu, Napoleon, Jefferson, 
Pitt, etc. The result would be an Encyclopaedia of 
Error. They would assert Slavery, Socialism, Per- 
secution, Divine Right, Military despotism, the 
reign of force, the supremacy of the executive over 
legislation and justice, purchase in the magistracy, 
the abolition of credit, the limitation of laws to nine- 
teen years, etc. If you were to read Walter Scott's 
pamphlets, Southey's Colloquies, Ellenborough's 
Diary, Wellington's Despatches — distrust of the 
select few, of the chosen leaders of the community, 
would displace the dread of the masses." 

It is well before parting from Acton to add his 
widest generalization. He was no disciple of 
Rousseau. He thought Rousseau's eloquence " un- 
real, unhealthy." He explicitly stood aloof from 
" the blaze and the whirlwind of Rousseau." 
" The danger is not that a particular class is unfit 
to govern," he declares. " Every class is unfit to 
govern. The law of liberty tends to abolish the 
reign of race over race, of faith over faith, of class 
over class. It is not the realization of a political 
ideal : it is the discharge of a moral obligation. . . . 
Nor do I admit the other accusation, of rousing class 
animosities. The upper class used to enjoy undi- 

[ 59 ] 



vided sway, and used it for their own advantage, 
protecting their interests against those below them, 
by laws which were selfish and often inhuman. Al- 
most all that has been done for the good of the peo- 
ple has been done since the rich lost the monopoly 
of power, since the rights of property were discov- 
ered to be not quite unlimited." 

THE EFFECT ON IRELAND 

This, I am persuaded, is the kind of preamble 
that Irish history calls for. Other considerations 
do weigh against and at times overbalance the eco- 
nomic one — the consideration of public policy 
mainly with a view to the safety of the realm; its 
consideration with a view to a select pursuit of eter- 
nal salvation; and its consideration with a view to 
national characteristics. The safety of the realm, 
it is perfectly clear, is a transcendent issue; but the 
kind of unhappiness that befell Ireland did not pri- 
marily hinge upon this issue, and it can be corrected 
without seriously affecting it. The clash of reli- 
gions is tragic but remediable. Neither Catholicism 
nor Presbyterianism excludes the unity and happi- 
ness of Irishmen. Nor is there any hopeless diffi- 
culty about accommodating the national character- 
istics of Scotch-Irish, Anglo-Irish, or Irish. In 
other countries, particularly the United States, we 
find varieties of religion and mixtures of race and 
social dissidence, but it was very largely because a 
privileged class insisted upon extending its privilege 
— one of property — that trouble in the United 
States became unavoidable. No American doubts 
that covert privilege was represented at the founda- 
tion of the union and made something of its oppor- 

[60] 



tunities but we have simply to imagine an overt par- 
ticularism on the part of New England, greedily 
clutching power to the bosom of New England, to 
decide that privilege would have wrecked federalism. 
The fate of the Jews is a supreme example of the 
result of invidious distinction, the baleful power of 
the Magyars is an example of an obvious source of 
it. National and racial and religious principles en- 
ter into all these conflicts, but without a powerful 
economic element you cannot have explosion. The 
long step toward political adjustment, to take it the 
other way, is the correction of economic differences. 
But it is the one step at which the British govern- 
ment of Ireland has oftenest faltered. Usually 
within the British government there have been per- 
sons like Lord Morley who interpreted the House 
of Commons in a spirit quite different from the 
glittering gayety of Walter Bagehot. Such liberals 
did not take their inspiration from sensible men of 
substantial means. They held their representative 
assembly in solemn honor. They believed it to be 
the bulwark of liberties as general as they were 
fundamental. They saw it as a wheel on which the 
destiny of the British people could be turned. At a 
time when the broadened electorate had just swept 
the rotten borough out of existence, they exulted in 
the transfer of power and trusted that it could work 
economic miracles. At the behest of such liberals, 
great changes did take place in Ireland. After a 
struggle that exhibited property stripped and bat- 
tling with naked indecency through long sessions of 
the House of Lords, the land question of Ireland 
was finally brought to an adjustment by the very 
junkers who had bled the peasantry. But this re- 

[61 ] 



mittance of the conquest of Ireland cannot be taken 
to typify the workings of government. On the con- 
trary, government has largely consisted in the sup- 
port and defence of privileged non-Irishmen who 
look on Ireland as their natural heritage. And the 
bitterest trials of well-meaning governors of Ireland 
have always come from persons fearful that their 
ancient privileges might be jeopardized. 

ONE TENTACLE OF PRIVILEGE 

Few people now remember the tenacity of the es- 
tablished Protestant church, for example, and its 
peculiar relation to Catholic Ireland. Yet it is 
worth recalling, if only to see how the favored in- 
stitutions of an alien government die hard. Some- 
where in Morley's life of Gladstone comes the pas- 
sage, " the contest was now removed from the con- 
stituencies and their representatives in parliament to 
the citadel of privilege. The issue was no longer 
single, and the struggle for religious equality in Ire- 
land was henceforth merged for the public eye in a 
conflict for the supremacy of the Commons in Eng- 
land. Perhaps I should not have spoken of religious 
equality, for in fact the establishment was known to 
be doomed, and the fight turned upon the amount of 
property with which the free church was to go forth 
to face the new fortunes. ' I should urge the House 
of Lords,' wrote the Archbishop of Canterbury to 
Mr. Gladstone, ' to give all its attention to saving as 
large an endowment as possible.' " 

In quoting this passage it is not my intention to 
cast an oblique glance at the idea or the nature of 
religious endowment. It is true that the established 
church in Ireland was a religious scandal. It was 

[62 ] 



also an economic scandal of the first order. Irish 
Catholic cities continue to offer the spectacle of the 
old historic cathedrals and churches still devoted to 
the use of Protestants, but this moss-grown evidence 
of confiscation is nothing to the active and inflamma- 
tory grievance that Catholics had before the dises- 
tablishment. Americans are serenely remote today 
from the conflicts that spring out of a state re- 
ligion, but there is still food for envious amazement 
at the fortunes acquired by Anglican dignitaries and 
the lucrative aspects of the Kingdom of God in 
Ireland. Ten prelates were once named to the 
House of Commons who had left this vale of tears 
bequeathing an average fortune of £250,000 apiece. 
In i860 the bishops held 743,326 acres of Ireland 
in trust for God. The governmental exaction of 
tithes amounted to about £500,000 a year, with 
bishoprics yielding from £2,310 to £14,632 a year. 
For 700,000 members of the state religion there 
were as many parochial clergymen as for the 4,500,- 
000 Catholics. These broad features of the estab- 
lishment were sufficiently undemocratic to make the 
issue invincible when it was fought to a finish. My 
object now, however, is not to break the law of 
oblivion but to give heed to Lord Morley's idioms. 
He calls the upper house " the citadel of privilege." 
He speaks of the " fight " turning upon " the amount 
of property." These are casual gleams of basic 
economic and governmental truths too little realized. 

THE HABIT OF GRIEVANCE 

The main reason for emphasizing privilege in re- 
gard to Ireland is, of course, the fact that it has re- 
mained a conquered country. It is this that has ac- 

[ 63 ] 



centuated privilege. It is perfectly true, as many 
professors will tell you, that there is a class struggle 
in England and America as well as in Ireland, and 
it is conceivable to argue that Ireland has about the 
same political advantages as Scotland or Wales. 
The really oppressed islander in this view is the all- 
sustaining Briton. This, I think, is one of Bernard 
Shaw's strongest feelings about the Irish question. 
He has seen Ireland press its claims on an exasper- 
ated and befuddled House of Commons until in mere 
moral confusion there have been gross concessions. 
In John Bull's Other Island Mr. Shaw has contrasted 
the pertinacious self-seeking Irish tenant with a 
dreadfully evicted and downtrodden Cockney, and 
the dramatist's sympathies are obviously with that 
particular limb of the predominant partner. Noth- 
ing is so tiresome to a man of Mr. Shaw's gallantry, 
on the other hand, as the drooping lip of suppliance. 
To be a willing object of pity, to approach life hat 
in hand, with an eye cocked for charity, goes against 
Mr. Shaw's individualism. He detests one thing as 
much as the other, the habit of intransigence and the 
habit of grievance. But this Shavian impatience is 
all right only so long as no " secret splinter " is left 
rankling. Many men take injustice standing up but 
very few, after all, take justice lying down. It is 
superficial to blame the Irishman for wincing until 
the power that injured him has been broken. That 
power is not the British empire. It is quite un- 
equivocally British imperialism. Added to the 
trials of class in Ireland, there are the trials of class 
identified with race and religion; with the oppres- 
sive class the imperial one. For Ireland is one 
of the objects that has made imperialism hateful. 

[ 64] 



THE CURSE OF IRELAND 
The Irish diagnosticians do not agree as to the 
cause of Ireland's condition. In ordinary talk each 
Irishman is likely, with decided emphasis, to at- 
tribute the state of the country to an overwhelming 
primary cause of his own. Since the state is un- 
happy, the cause is always deep-seated, and, if pos- 
sible, beyond human control. It is defined as " the 
curse of Ireland." Intemperance, Sir, is the curse 
of Ireland. The English gover'ment is the one in- 
fliction of the people. The priests is at the back of 
it all, the priests are the damn ruination of the coun- 
try. It's the Scarlet Woman. To Hell with the 
Pope. The graziers are the curse of Ireland. The 
A. O. H. is the curse of Ireland. Gambling is the 
blight of the land. Cooperation is part of the con- 
ciliation policy, and everyone knows that conciliation 
is the curse. It's ignorance, the lack of a proper 
education, that is the destruction of Irishmen. The 
gombeen man is the curse of Ireland. Yesterday 
it was the landlord, today it is the beggar on horse- 
back, who rides the country to the devil. West 
Britonism makes us what we are, shoneenism and 
toadyism, so it is, they're the curse of Ireland. You 
can't find an Irishman to do an honest day's work. 
The class of people that goes into service today 
aren't fit for the poorhouse; laziness is the curse of 
Ireland. Black tea, stewing on the hob, has the 
country destroyed. It's new-fangled notions, put- 
ting false ideas into the heads of the working-people, 
that's the curse of Ireland. Ah, it's the climate, 
your Honor. It's a terrible climate ! The climate 
is the curse of Ireland. 

[ 65 ] 



HOW IT HAPPENED 

It is important in this sort of inquiry to change 
the venue. The average Englishman agrees with 
this principle and is always satisfied to take the 
conference from Ennis or Enniscorthy to Oxford or 
London. But pleasant as it is to have a jury of 
one's British Peers, I prefer at the moment to sum- 
mon France and Italy. My first two witnesses, un- 
fortunately, will be papists. One is a witness 
against the crown, the Rev. Adolphe Perraud, a 
somewhat tainted witness. The other, however, is 
a most impartial fellow. He is to testify on the side 
of the crown and his name is Niccolo Machiavelli. 
The Pope, as we know, " has a bad name in Porta- 
down," which is in Ulster, and I dislike to bring for- 
ward so complete a papist as Old Nick; but he testi- 
fies for Ulster so sympathetically! 

Cardinal Perraud, as he afterwards became, wrote 
in the last generation. He was one of a large num- 
ber of Frenchmen who have studied Ireland, and he 
was quick to lay his finger on the parent economic 
trouble, the nature of Irish conquest. " Ireland is 
not simply a conquered country]' he said with the 
gesticulation of italics, " she is a confiscated coun- 
try; that is to say, the suppression of her nationality 
and the proscription of her religion are not her only 
wrongs: what her oppressors coveted and wrenched 
from her beyond her national independence and re- 
ligion . . . was the lordship of the Irish soil; so 
that, as in the wars of antiquity, or the times of bar- 
baric invasion, it was the ownership of the land 
which was wrested from the vanquished, it was the 
land itself, and not merely political rights, which the 
victors claimed and seized." 

[ 66] 



It must be allowed that the fact of this barbarian 
invasion, this " forcible confiscation of Irish land, 
and the ' planting ' of English and Scotch settlers," 
has the extreme merit of undisputed authenticity, 
but before I report it I should like to give the moral 
background of the confiscation. Its descendants call 
it " trusteeship for the empire," but they bite the 
fine Italian hand that fed them. Machiavelli must 
be set down as the spiritual godfather of Ulster. 
The present status of Ulster, indeed, illustrates the 
drawbacks of Realpolitik. 

" When dominions are acquired in a province dif- 
fering in language, laws, and customs," said the 
candid Italian, " the difficulties to be overcome are 
great, and it requires good fortune as well as great 
industry to retain them. . . . The remedy is to 
plant colonies in one or two places which form as 
it were the keys of the land, for it is necessary either 
to do this or to maintain a large force of armed men. 
The colonies will cost the prince little; with little 
or no expense on his part, he can send and maintain 
them; he only injures those whose lands and houses 
are taken to give to the new inhabitants, and these 
form but a small proportion of the state, and those 
who are injured remain poor and scattered, can 
never do any harm to him, and all the others are, 
on the one hand, not injured and therefore easily 
pacified; and, on the other, are fearful of offending 
lest they should be treated like those who have been 
dispossessed of their property. To conclude, these 
colonies cost nothing, are more faithful, and give 
less offence; and the injured parties being poor and 
scattered are unable to do mischief, as I have shown. 
For it must be noted, that men must either be 

[ 67 ] 



caressed or else annihilated; they will revenge them- 
selves for small injuries, but cannot do so for great 
ones; the injury therefore that we do to a man must 
be such that we need not fear his vengeance." 

So much for the principle upon which the country 
was colonized. Two men outside Ireland, Erskine 
Childers and Emile Boutmy, may now be taken to 
describe in a brief manner the process of applying 
Machiavelli. 

Mr. Childers shows that Ireland came into the 
full view of young imperialism at the same time as 
the American continent, and he makes a valuable 
parallel. " Adventurous and ambitious English- 
men began to regard her fertile acres as Raleigh 
regarded America, and, in point of time, the sys- 
tematic and State-aided colonization of Ireland is 
approximately contemporaneous with that of Amer- 
ica. It is true that until the first years of the six- 
teenth century no permanent British settlement had 
been made in America, while in Ireland the planta- 
tion of King's and Queen's Counties was begun as 
early as 1556, and under Elizabeth further vast 
confiscations were carried out in Munster within the 
same century. But from the reign of James I on- 
ward, the two processes advance pari passu. Vir- 
ginia, first founded by Raleigh in 1585, is firmly 
settled in 1607, just before the confiscation of 
Ulster and its plantation by 30,000 Scots; and in 
1620, just after that huge measure of expropriation, 
the Pilgrim Fathers landed in New Plymouth. 
Puritan Massachusetts — with its offshoots, Con- 
necticut, New Haven, and Rhode Island — as well 
as Catholic Maryland, were formally established be- 
tween 1629 and 1638, and Maine in 1639, at a 

[ 68 ] 



period when the politically inspired proscription of 
the Catholic religion, succeeding the robbery of the 
soil, was goading the unhappy Irish to the rebellion 
of 164.1. While that rebellion, with its fierce ex- 
cesses and pitiless reprisals, was convulsing Ireland, 
the united Colonies of New England banded them- 
selves together for mutual defence." 

THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING INDIAN 

American colonization was a success because the 
American Indian was annihilated. The Irish were 
not exterminable. " A few years later Cromwell, 
aiming, through massacre and rapine, at the ex- 
termination of the Irish race, with the savage watch- 
word, ' To Hell or Connaught,' planted Ulster, 
Munster and Leinster with men of the same stock, 
stamp and ideas as the colonists of New England, 
and in the first years of the Restoration Charles II 
confirmed these confiscations, at the same time that 
he granted Carolina to Lord Clarendon, New 
Netherlands to the Duke of York, and New Jersey 
to Lord Berkeley, and issued fresh charters for 
Connecticut and Maryland. . . . 

" It is interesting, and for a proper understand- 
ing of the Irish question, indispensable, briefly to 
contrast the characteristics and progress of the 
American and Irish settlements, and in doing so to 
observe the profound effects of geographical posi- 
tion and political institutions on human charac- 
ter. . . . 

" Let us note, first, that both in America and 
Ireland the Colonies were bi-racial, with this all- 
important distinction, that in America the native 
race was coloured, savage, heathen, nomadic, in- 

[ 69 ] 



capable of fusion with the whites, and in relation 
to the almost illimitable territory colonized, not 
numerous; while in Ireland the native race was white, 
civilized, Christian, numerous and confined within 
the limits of a small island to which it was passion- 
ately attached by treasured national traditions, and 
whose soil it cultivated under an ancient and revered 
system of tribal tenure. The parallel, then, in this 
respect, is slight, and becomes insignificant, except 
in regard to the similarity of the mental attitude of 
the colonists towards Indians and Irish respect- 
ively." 

In other words, the good Indian is the dead In- 
dian. It is not so many years since an Englishman, 
visiting the United States, humorously suggested 
that two difficult non-Teutonic problems could be 
solved if every Irishman in America murdered a 
Negro and was hanged for it. This would leave 
the world to the everlasting amity of Briton, Amer- 
ican and German. Mr. Freeman was quite sur- 
prised that his joke was not universally enjoyed. 
But M. Boutmy throws some light on the seamy side 
of the joke: "The Englishman established him- 
self in that country by force, and, significant fact, 
governs it by force. He began by driving the Irish 
back beyond the pale, and a little later became master 
of the whole island. He cemented his dominion 
under Elizabeth and Cromwell by conscientious mas- 
sacres. On the field of battle he made no prison- 
ers; he hunted the fugitives like wild beasts, and 
transported the inhabitants of an entire district to 
Barbadoes as slaves. It was a war of extermina- 
tion." 

" The whole of your island has been confiscated," 
[ 7o] 



said the Earl of Clare in 1799, "with the excep- 
tion of the estates of four or six families of Eng- 
lish blood, some of whom had been attainted in the 
reign of Henry VIII, but recovered their posses- 
sions before Tyrone's rebellion, and had the good 
fortune to escape the pillage of the English re- 
public inflicted by Cromwell; and no inconsiderable 
portion of the island has been confiscated twice or 
perhaps thrice in the course of a century." 

I am tempted to add the powerful testimony of 
Edmund Burke. " The original scheme," he de- 
clared at the end of the eighteenth century, " was 
never deviated from for a single hour. Unheard-of 
confiscations were made in the northern parts, upon 
grounds of plots and conspiracies, never proved upon 
their supposed authors. The war of chicane suc- 
ceeded to the war of arms and of hostile statutes; 
and a regular series of operations was carried on, 
particularly from Chichester's time, in the ordinary 
courts of justice, and by special commissions and 
inquisitions; first under pretence of tenures, and then 
of titles in the crown, for the purpose of the total 
extirpation of the interest of the natives in their 
own soil — until these species of subtle ravage, being 
carried to the last excess of oppression and inso- 
lence under Lord Strafford, it kindled the flames of 
that rebellion which broke out in 1641." 

THE DIRTY IRISH 

Although this is 19 18, please remember 1641. 
It will presently reappear. But before going to 
the live issue of Ulster it is well to look at the dead 
issue of landlordism, both issues having originated 
in the confiscations. In one respect, it is clear, 

[ 7i ] 



Machiavelli was misapplied. The native Irish were 
not exterminated. Hundreds of thousands of them 
went to the continent as soldiers, a flight of " wild 
geese." Some went as slaves to the Barbadoes. 
A few emigrated to the colonies. But most of them 
hung on, occupying parts of their old lands at ex- 
orbitant rents. Various aspects of their strange 
history will recur in this book. It is enough now 
to state that their compulsory occupation was agri- 
culture, for which they were technically untrained, 
and economically unequipped, and in which the 
" law " gave them little countenance or security. 

Till quite late in the nineteenth century the vast 
majority of these native Irish remained ignorant 
and poverty-stricken serfs, subsisting for the most 
part on milk and potatoes, always living on the brink 
of starvation, and condemned by what President 
Wilson calls " economic servitude " to labor not in 
their own interests but in the interests of the govern- 
ing class. So prone was their condition that the 
royal commission of 1836 reported the number of 
persons out of work and in distress as 585,000, with 
1,800,000 dependents, making 2,385,000 in all. 
The average weekly wage for laborers was from 2s 
to 2s 6d per week. So dreadful was this distress 
that the plutocracy and aristocracy of England, act- 
ing through Lord John Russell, sent over a com- 
missioner to Ireland to devise a workhouse in which 
these serfs could be stored in a " superior degree of 
comfort." The commissioner, strange to relate, 
found that the Irish serf was unwilling to pay this 
modest punishment for the crime of poverty. 
" Confinement of any kind is more irksome to an 
Irishman than it is even to an Englisman," reports 

[ 72 ] 



the Commissioner, " and hence, although the Irish- 
man may be lodged, fed and clothed in a workhouse 
better than he could lodge, feed and clothe himself 
by his own exertions, he will yet never enter the 
workhouse unless driven there by actual necessity." 
Lord John Russell's " superior degree of comfort " 
may be judged from the dietary of the two Dublin 
workhouses in 1841, which was stigmatized by the 
Commissioner as " too abundant." " There were 
two meals a day. Breakfast, every day 7 ounces of 
oatmeal and stirabout; Dinner, on five days of the 
week, 4 lbs. of potatoes weighed raw, and half pint 
of butter milk; on two days of the week, 2 lbs. pota- 
toes weighed raw, the potatoes being stewed in 
broth. That was a style of dietary that was su- 
perior to that of the independent laborer outside." 
Had the aristagogue Bagehot adverted to the vul- 
gar realities of the human stomach, he might have 
despaired less of the lower orders of mankind. 
But such a dietary, and such a living wage, naturally 
resulted in degradation. The common Irish were 
lazy, on this superb diet. They were dirty, on a 
soap that was heavily taxed. They were improvi- 
dent, on 2s 6d a week. They were drunken, out of 
reckless levity. They were suspicious and unre- 
liable, in spite of Lord John Russell's beneficent 
offer of the poorhouse. 

THE FALL OF FEUDALISM 

The climax of this situation was the famine of 
1845— 1849. This famine came after the investiga- 
tions of numerous experts. It had been foreseen, 
it had even been reckoned " inevitable." It cost 
7 2 9>°33 lives. " Far more," said John Bright, 

[ 73 ] 



" than ever fell by the sword in any war England 
ever waged." I regret to say that this statement, 
hard as it was, could not remain perpetually true. 
The total British killed in the world war up to 
January i, 1916, was 128,136, about one-sixth of 
the peace mortality of the Irish famine, but since 
then the hideous ingenuity and exaction of a world- 
wide war has slain (up to May 1, 19 18) over one 
million English, Irish, Scotch, Welsh, Canadians, 
Australians, South Africans, New Zealanders, In- 
dians, and other defenders of the empire. 

The proximate cause of the great famine was the 
potato blight. The underlying cause was the multi- 
plication of holdings during the prosperity of the 
Napoleonic wars, enormous subletting, and landlord 
greed. We learn now, from the research of the 
Irish quarterly, Studies, that there were 5,702,133 
country-people living in mud cabins in 1841, with 
2,066,290 living on holdings utterly incapable of 
supporting them. When the potatoes failed every- 
thing was lost, and most of these peasants died either 
of typhus fever or " the great hunger." An or- 
ganizer like Mr. Hoover might have saved most of 
them, if permitted to do so, but during that great 
hunger the following excellent foods were sold and 
allowed to leave Ireland: 572,485 head of cattle; 
839,118 sheep; 699,021 pigs; 2,532,839 qrs. of 
oats; 1,821,091 cwts. of oatmeal; 455,256 qrs. of 
wheat; 1,494,852 cwts. of wheatmeal. These 
would have prevented famine, but in the absence of 
self-government an embargo was impossible to 
Irishmen. Yet the correct English judgment in 
1917 still firmly refuses to entertain the property 
aspect of the famine. I shall quote elsewhere a most 

[ 74] 



accomplished Oxford professor, Mr. Ernest Barker, 
to the effect that the culprit was " nature." Or, as 
one is afraid the Kaiser would say, the will of God. 

Yet the economic power of the landlord could 
scarcely survive this disaster and disgrace. It cost 
fifty years of agitation and £185,000,000 to clean up 
landlordism, but the transfer of economic power in 
this department of Irish life has now been substan- 
tially effected. The unfortunate legacies from land- 
lordism will later be examined, but it is best first of 
all to face the rebuttal to my accusation of landlord 
greed. That rebuttal I prefer to give you in other 
words than my own. It is utterly wrong, I have 
been told, to make it appear " that the English gov- 
ernment and English landlords in Ireland had been 
monsters and that glorious, free America had been 
the rescue of the Irish. That the law and the sys- 
tem of land tenure in Ireland up to about forty 
years ago were unsuitable and caused sad tragedies 
is sure, but they were precisely the same as in Amer- 
ica and everywhere else. America was the main 
cause of the destruction of Ireland, because Ireland 
could not compete with the fertile sunny climate of 
America in agriculture, or with the enormous extent 
of cheap land in America for stock rearing. The 
constant lowering of prices was disastrous to Ire- 
land. The fault of England was the fault of human 
nature. We only very slowly and under much pres- 
sure came to understand that laws which were suit- 
able in rich England or America were impossible in 
poverty-stricken Ireland. We did not at first under- 
stand the problems, and nor would any other gov- 
ernment. 

11 For the most part the landlords were kindly 
[ 75 ] 



and well-meaning, and did not press for the collec- 
tion of their rents, but took what they could get, as 
was shown by the enormous arrears which were 
wiped out by the first land law. 

" The recent prosperity of Ireland is due much 
more to the rise of agricultural prices of late years 
than to modern legislation, though that, too, has had 
a good effect. 

" It is only natural that people who see themselves 
being gradually ruined, should attribute the evil to 
a foreign government, which is not sympathetic, and 
which puts tremendous power into the hands of the 
creditor. That power should be curtailed all over 
the world as it has been in Ireland in land questions, 
and as it should be in all transactions." 

THE CASE AGAINST LANDLORDS 

This defence falls into four parts, First, the argu- 
ment of lowered prices and American competition. 
Lowered prices did undoubtedly drive the landlords 
from tillage, but instead of reconstruction, the 
peasants got eviction. The landlords, on the con- 
trary, raised cattle instead of grain, and suffered no 
prime hardship. Second, the English " did not un- 
derstand the problems, nor would any other govern- 
ment." The answer to this is clear. The Irish 
fought, bled and died to be allowed to deal with 
their own problems and take the consequences. The 
repeal agitation walked step by step with the ap- 
proach of famine. The alien government con- 
fessedly " did not understand the problems." It 
failed utterly either to learn those problems or to 
quit forcing its blunders on Ireland. It is a shock- 
ing defence of that policy that " very slowly and 

[ 76 ] 



under much pressure " the governing class came to 
see that English conceptions did not suit poverty- 
stricken Ireland. It took 729,000 deaths from 
starvation to make England see a need that was as 
plain as a pikestaff to Ireland. Besides, under the 
economic law ignorance of the law is no excuse. 

The third point is that, however culpable Eng- 
land might be, the landlords " took what they could 
get." It is not mere flippancy to say that most of 
them certainly did. These kindly and well-meaning 
creatures are now taking the last they could get, 
and it will amount to £185,000,000. This, from 
poverty-stricken Ireland, is not such a bad bon voy- 
age. It is well to remember that, in 1880, 750 men 
owned half the area of this wretched country, and 
seven absentee strangers took £100,000 in annual 
rent out of one poor western county alone. 

Considering how much the landlords lost by be- 
ing landlords it pays very well to give up losing it. 
There is a lot of tribute to be offered to the ancien 
regime, but £185,000,000 goes a palpable distance in 
that direction. The real condemnation of Irish 
landlordism was not, however, the rent. It was the 
non-English system by which the rent left the coun- 
try, taking all the capital out of agriculture and 
throwing on an insecure tenant the hopeless burden 
of improvements. 

The last point, that good legislation was not 
everything, is partly sound. The change to peasant 
proprietorship substitutes for a flexible rental a 
rigid medium-sized annual charge. So long as there 
is agricultural prosperity, this annual payment seems 
a good bargain, but a big slump in prices would pinch 
the tenants immediately, where it once would have 

[ 77 ] 



taxed the landlords. It is the landlord to whom 
the government really gave security. This is the 
cloud of which peasant proprietorship is the silver 
lining. The fate of Ireland is bound up with the 
fate of agriculture, good government or bad govern- 
ment. Yet one cannot take this as an apology for 
government admittedly bad, nor is it a real argu- 
ment for landlordism. If it points to anything, it 
points to fiscal as well as administrative autonomy. 
Government, after all, can do something besides 
make two policemen grow where one grew before. 
It is a benign fact that it is no longer needful to re- 
cite the unfair terms of land tenure and the ferocious 
processes of eviction. With the vested interests that 
confiscation created there was a devotion of every 
energy and resource of the country to the service 
of its landed beneficiaries, with the government either 
eager or compliant. Not only the military and the 
armed police stood back of the " garrison." These 
occupiers supplied the administrators or dictated the 
administration. They gave law to the judiciary. 
They packed the juries. They levied local taxes. 
They recruited the militia. They kept Ireland in 
educational eclipse. This in the main was neither 
malignancy nor even stupidity. It was the inevit- 
able result of a system that they were too dependent 
to change and too inert to manage. Their very in- 
ertia and dependence doomed them. The peas- 
antry, working through the parliamentary party by 
virtue of the franchise, won back by rods and acres 
the land that was wrested by baronies and shires. 
English liberalism, of course, had its great share 
in this reformation, but the delay in the reformation 
made more political impression than its conse- 

[ 78 ] 



quences. " Burke left behind him two warnings, 
both of them full of truth, full of gravity," Matthew 
Arnold has written. " One is, that concessions, 
sufficient if given in good time and at a particular 
conjuncture of events, become insufficient if deferred. 
The other is, that concessions, extorted from em- 
barrassment and fear, produce no gratitude, and 
allay no resentment. ' God forbid,' he cries, ' that 
our conduct should demonstrate to the world that 
Great Britain can in no instance whatsoever be 
brought to a sense of rational and equitable policy, 
but by coercion and force of arms.' " 

ULSTER 

This brings us to Ulster. What is the Ulster 
question and who has a vested interest in it? Whose 
privileges will be disturbed if the Catholic and the 
Presbyterian come together? Is there any real 
cause for separation between these co-habitants of 
the prosperous eastern counties of Ulster? Is there 
any real reason why they cannot work together for 
Ireland? The nationalist politician says there is 
no reason. The unionist politician's reply is to 
laugh. He sees the proposal of unity as a levelling- 
down of the Ulsterman, never as a levelling-up of the 
nationalist, and he has his answer ready for every 
historic recrimination and gibe. The landlords of 
the south may have lost their grip on their ascend- 
ancy; that is no reason why the Ulstermen should 
be supine in yielding their birthright. The old- 
guard Unionists, English and Irish, keep crying to 
them, " no surrender " and " never say die." 

You may offer the Unionist a faint word in re- 
gard to the history of Ulster. Ah-ha. says the 

[ 79 ] 



Orange spokesman of 19 17, you are digging up this 
old question of title to incite the greedy! "There 
is not a Roman Catholic in Ulster," as Mr. Ernest 
Hamilton, ex-M.P., puts it, " to whom the promise 
of home rule does not mean the promise of the re- 
covery of forfeited lands. In some districts the 
lands of the Protestant farmers have already been 
officially allotted among the native population." 
Mark the word native. This faith in the Apache 
character of Ulster Catholics is an important ele- 
ment in the programme of politicians like Mr. 
Hamilton. " Yes," says Mr. Hamilton, " Ulster 
was colonized. But let us consider further. Is 
colonization to be classed as an act of piracy, or is 
it a necessary part of the gradual reclamation of the 
world? ... It can safely be said that no coloniza- 
tion scheme has ever been more abundantly justified, 
both by antecedent conditions and by results, than 
has that of Ulster by James I of England." Of 
course the natives disliked this holy war of civiliza- 
tion, but natives are so unreasonable. " It was clear 
that the goodwill of the natives could not be won by 
individual acts of kindness. All such were out- 
weighed, and, indeed, wholly neutralized by the 
initial act of usurpation. Nothing could have been 
more conciliatory than the James I settlers, but their 
conciliation had counted for nothing in face of the 
one salient fact that they were in arbitrary occupa- 
tion of Irish soil." Hence the natives' uprising in 
1641 and the massacre of the colonists. Are the 
natives different today? "The soul of the native 
Irish has not at the present day changed by the 
width of a hair from what it was in 1641, and again 
in 1798. . . . All conciliatory measures fail to con- 

[ 80] 



ciliate, or to elicit the faintest spark of gratitude." 
Here you get the " Ulster question " in its raw- 
ness. No partisan exponent on either side can for- 
get this list of ancient and honorable grievances, and 
he rejoices to know that the conflict is kept alive by 
the religious difference, marked by the failure of 
Presbyterian and Catholic to intermarry. But, the 
American asks, what is it all about? What hap- 
pened in 1 172 and 1641 and 1798, and before the 
flood, and why? And why harp on it? What is 
its significance in the twentieth century? 

The American is really interested. Here is the 
Ulster minority conflicting with the Irish majority, 
just as the Irish minority conflicted with the Eng- 
lish majority. If " minority rights " are sauce for 
the Irish, they should be sauce for the Ulsterman. 
Why should nationalists try to bully the men in the 
north? Since 19 10 this phase of the political ques- 
tion in Ireland has arrested many Americans. 
Ulster has superseded the climate and the clergy in 
causing perplexity. The logic of the situation makes 
it seem practically insurmountable. 

Not only does the logic of it seem unsurmountable 
but the very size of Ulster is in its favour. When 
you turn the street-corner and suddenly come on a 
fight, your sympathies go to the under-dog, and when 
the crowd preserves a mysterious impartiality, the 
angel in you records another note on man's inhuman- 
ity to man. Then you inquire about the fight. 
And sometimes, not always, you discover that No. 2, 
the object of your sympathies, is not himself a mem- 
ber of the peace party but a willing combatant. 
Cold though it may be, you admit that to judge of 
any sort of a fight it is not enough to rush to the 

[ 81 ] 



side which presents at the moment the defensive 
spectacle. It is not the defence, but the thing de- 
fended that matters. In the affairs of nations, this 
is also true. During the Civil War, the south at- 
tracted to its side many people at a distance who were 
inspired by the heroic defensive spectacle. But as 
time went on, foreign opinion came to consider the 
thing defended as well as the heroism of defence, 
and certainly the day arrived when a southern sym- 
pathizer like George Meredith learned to be sur- 
prised at the temper in which he had been prone to 
liken Lincoln to a gorilla. 

CAPITALISM IN ULSTER 

It is for an economic reason, unfortunately, that 
Belfast, and the Ulster which it represents, is the 
sorest problem of Irish democracy. Its wealth 
makes it shrink from agricultural Ireland. Power- 
ful and affluent, it affirms an imperative will as re- 
gards home rule, and that will is largely the evidence 
of capitalism in power. 

The interests of capitalism are in the main an- 
tagonistic to the interests of the small nationality. 
As M. Gregor Alexinsky has observed in regard to 
Poland, capitalist industry " requires a centralized 
system of government." It is in this principle, not 
in any racial or religious principle, that the im- 
perialism of Belfast is firmly founded. 

Before the development of capitalism the Belfast 
bourgeoisie was a hotbed of republicanism. But 
with Andrew Mulholland's introduction of yarn ma- 
chinery in 1830, its republicanism faded finally away. 
Labor was cheap in Belfast, and on cheap labor 
plus machine efficiency Belfast, without one natural 

[ 82 ] 



advantage, became a typical industrial capitalistic 
community. Its rulers' interests thereafter became 
identical with the interests of the British plutocracy. 
The supreme guardian of those interests is the 
British parliament. Belfast became riven to the 
union. And just as British labor has fought its fight 
in the British parliament, so the Belfast proletariat 
that fears and hates the Catholic has followed suit. 
The Belfast proletariat scanned Ireland in vain for 
favorable political alliance. In the powerful cross- 
channel labor organizations it saw its hope for in- 
dustrial improvement. Unionist pamphlets show 
that it actually " beseeches " British labor not to de- 
sert it. 

Meanwhile the Unionist branch of the Belfast 
proletariat has its share of the general evils of 
capitalism, though the under-dog in Belfast is the 
Catholic. " Whatever benefit has accrued to the 
merchants of Belfast from the union," says St. John 
Ervine, " none of that benefit has accrued to the 
working people." 

That Belfast's opposition to home rule is a result 
of economic development, that this development par- 
takes of the general evils of capitalism, and that the 
Unionist ideology is imperialist ideology is evident 
on even a hasty inquiry, though whether home rule 
can solve the problem of Ulster democracy is an- 
other question. 

BEFORE THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 

Before capitalism developed, Belfast made no 
secret of its antagonism to the British connection. 

" The Presbyterianism of the North, and espe- 
cially of Belfast, had long been inclined to republi- 
cs ] 



canism," remarks Lecky of the year 1790. "In 
July, 179 1, the anniversary of the French Revolu- 
tion was celebrated at Belfast with great enthusiasm. 
All the volunteers of the neighborhood attended. 
An address drawn up in the most fulsome strain of 
admiration was sent to France. Democratic toasts 
were drunk, and speeches made eulogizing Paine, 
Washington, and the French Revolution, and de- 
manding an equal representation in parliament, and 
the abolition of the remaining Popery laws. A reso- 
lution was shortly after drawn up by the first volun- 
teer company, in favor of the abolition of religious 
disqualifications, and it was responded to by an ad- 
dress of thanks from some Catholic bodies. This 
was said to have been the first considerable sign of 
that union between the Presbyterians and Catholics 
which led to the formation of the United Irish 
Society." 

There were other signs of a love of Ireland, a 
broad community, in the Orange country. Protes- 
tant Yeomen, representing 143 corps, had met in the 
church at Duncannon and passed a resolution that 
" as men, as Irishmen, as Christians, and as Protes- 
tants " they rejoiced in the relaxation of the penal 
laws. And the annual Presbyterian synod of Ulster 
expressed " its satisfaction at the admission of the 
Catholics to the privileges of the Constitution." 

" In the same year, 1793, the popularity of re- 
publican sentiments at Belfast was shown by the 
signs representing Mirabeau, Dumouriez, Franklin 
and Washington, which hung in the streets, and in 
March a fierce riot was occasioned by a party of 
dragoons who attempted to cut them down." 

" Indignation at the war was at this time the 
£84] 



dominant sentiment of the Belfast party. . . . They 
say in one of their addresses, ' Why should we inter- 
fere because France, like Cromwell, has killed a 
guilty king? Let the rich who want war pay for it. 
The people are starving. Trade in all its branches 
is paralyzed. Yet Ireland has no cause of quarrel 
with France.' " 

" Prayers for the success of the French arms had 
been offered up at Belfast from the pulpit." 

Lecky then analyzes the practical motives under 
this republicanism. " The republican religion of the 
Northern Presbyterians gave them some bias to- 
wards republican government, and their sympathy 
with the New England Puritans in the contest against 
England had been passionate and avowed. They 
had scarcely any part among the landed gentry of 
Ireland, and were therefore less sensible than other 
Protestants of the necessity of connection with Eng- 
land for the security of their property. . . . Under 
the existing system of monopoly they had scarcely 
any political power, and scarcely any share in the 
patronage of the Crown. An intelligent, educated, 
energetic middle-class community naturally resented 
such a system of exclusion and monopoly far more 
keenly than a poor, dependent, and perfectly igno- 
rant Catholic peasantry. ... It is an undoubted 
and most remarkable fact that almost the whole 
guiding influence of the seditious movement in 1793 
was Protestant or Deistical, while the Catholic 
gentry, the Catholic prelates, and, as far as can now 
be judged, the bulk of the Catholic priesthood were 
strongly opposed to it." 

"The condition of Ulster in the spring of 1793 
was so serious that the Government strongly urged 

[ 85 ] 



the necessity of sending reinforcements to that 
province." 

It is interesting to note that Lecky, the anti-utili- 
tarian, catches a gleam of the economic motive in 
this republicanism. The Presbyterians " were less 
sensible than other Protestants of the necessity of 
connection with England for the security of their 
property." 

SINCE THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 

When, however, Belfast became homogeneous 
with the rest of capitalistic England, its ideology 
underwent a complete revolution. 

In 1913 Ulstermen "yield to no man in their 
loyalty to the king and to the Empire." They de- 
clare themselves " loyal subjects of His Gracious 
Majesty King George V," " the King, whose faithful 
subjects we are and will continue all our days." In 
1913, " the overwhelming majority are passionately 
loyal to the British Throne and to the maintenance 
of the United Kingdom." 

The Ulstermen, it must be confessed, did not make 
much of a fist of loyalty for a long while. Quite 
early in the eighteenth century the relations between 
the " undertakers," the oligarchs of confiscation, and 
their Presbyterian tenants were severely strained, 
and emigration to America was often chosen in 
preference to rackrent. The name of Lord Done- 
gall was identified with the worst oppression, and 
" illegal associations and daring outrages," with the 
houghing and maiming of cattle as a typical incident 
of the warfare, culminated in what is rightly termed 
" the Ulster land war of 1770." The government 
took the side of the " undertakers," so that the 

[ 86 ] 



spirit of Ulster emigrants to the American colonies 
was strongly antigovernmental; and the way was 
paved for the United Irishmen movement and the 
general revolutionary infection of the late eighteenth 
century. There was a common cause at that hour in 
Irish history between the dissenters and those Catho- 
lics who were not too crushed to be rebellious. But 
the ingredients of conflict were not taken away by 
this goodwill. There were always secret associa- 
tions on both sides whose principle was hatred and 
whose aim was extirpation. Just when the revolu- 
tionary movement was making such headway, with 
the example of France inflaming the republicans of 
Belfast, a few tragedies of local religious hatred 
occurred. The terrible murder of a Protestant 
schoolteacher's family preceded a pitched battle be- 
tween Catholics and Protestants. This incident 
resurrected hostility. It had enormous conse- 
quences. The Orange Society was formed on the 
very evening of the battle of the Diamond; and hun- 
dreds of Catholic deportations to Connaught were 
carried out under the eyes of the authorities, with the 
double effect of restoring Ulstermen to the side of 
" law and order " and inflaming the Catholic coun- 
try people against the government. The rebellion 
of 1798, with its 50,000 casualties, was the harvest 
of many sorrows, but the men of Ulster were no 
longer on the side of rebellion. And the ferocity 
of the rebellion deepened and widened the chasm. 
The Ulster unionists are homogeneous with the 
Scotch and English liberal unionists. " We are in 
Ireland as their trustees, having had committed to 
us, through their and our forefathers, the develop- 
ment of the material resources of Ulster, the preser- 

[87] 



vation of its loyalty, and the discharge of its share 
of imperial obligations. . . . Ulster Unionists, 
therefore, having conspicuously succeeded in main- 
taining the trust committed to their forefathers, and 
constituting a community intensely loyal to the Brit- 
ish connection, believe that they present a case for 
the unimpaired maintenance of that connection which 
is impregnable on the grounds of racial sentiments, 
inherent justice, social well-being, and the continued 
security of the United Kingdom and the Empire. 
They cannot believe that their British fellow-citizens 
will, at this crisis, turn a deaf ear to their claim. . . . 
We shall continue to support our King, and to render 
the same services to the United Kingdom and to the 
Empire as have characterized the history of Ulster 
during the past three hundred years." 

From these evidences of the contrast between 
1793 and 19 13, it seems highly probable that Bel- 
fast, " under the stress of economic development," 
has come to oppose political independence. It is no 
less probable that the homogeneity of Irish and 
Scotch " unionism " is not so much of racial senti- 
ment, etc., as of capitalist industry. In its economic 
utterances one finds the Belfast Chamber of Com- 
merce entirely dispensing with racial sentiment. Its 
grounds for desiring union are stated with sincerity: 

" The fact that our industrial growth is due to 
the development of trade with England and Scot- 
land and is also of an international character, and 
further that the amount of trade done by our ship- 
building and manufacturing concerns for Irish clients 
is comparatively trivial, amply justifies our desire 
for the maintenance of the closest relations with 
Great Britain and complete association with the 

[ 88 ] 



world-wide prestige of the United Kingdom in which 
we freely participate." 

It is precisely the situation that M. Alexinsky 
sketches for Poland. " In pouring its merchandise 
into the Russian markets, Poland, or rather the 
Polish bourgeoisie, had to abandon the old dream of 
political independence. The appearance on the 
Russian markets of Polish fabrics, of Polish coal 
and iron, came as a veritable Finis Poloniae, for it 
served as the unshakeable foundation material of 
political unity with Russia." A statement which, 
despite the war, remains significant. 

" HOME RULE COVETS ULSTER'S WEALTH " 

The thought of home rule makes the blood of 
capitalism run colder than usual. There is very lit- 
tle about " the horrible harlot " in the property argu- 
ment. The whole argument is this, " Home rule 
covets Ulster's wealth." Under the government of 
the United Kingdom, the Belfast capitalists believe 
that they have the power to control their own future. 
Under home rule, they " are to be deprived of the 
power." And so sensitive is capital to this impend- 
ing disadvantage that the mere introduction of the 
bill " has seriously shaken credit." This manifesta- 
tion of " insecurity and suspicion " leads the Belfast 
capitalists to utter a very genuine estimate of the 
Irish inability to make good. " Ireland possesses 
neither the natural resources, the capital, nor the 
unity of race or interest capable of enabling it suc- 
cessfully to stand alone without the support of Im- 
perial credit." 

Regardless, then, of political and religious differ- 
ences, the Ulster leaders find in the agriculturalism 

[ 89 ] 



of southern Ireland a " very serious danger." And 
they do not hesitate to characterize their opposition 
to home rule as " the bitter hostility of the most 
progressive and industrial part " of Ireland. 

It is only fair to the capitalists to record the strong 
sentiment against the agricultural south that also 
possesses one branch of the Ulster trade unionists. 
These trade unionists, who confess that they " are 
the cream of Ulster Democracy," issued their own 
manifesto in April, 19 14. Their quality may be 
judged by their leading arguments, which were as 
follows : 

1. "The Dublin Parliament may fix a minimum 
wage for Ireland and the British Parliament may fix: 
a minimum wage for Britain. The Irish minimum 
would in all probability be lower." 

This is a short-sighted argument. Since, as they 
admit, trade unionism has protested in vain 
" against the separate treatment of England, Scot- 
land, Wales and Ireland under the Insurance Act," 
what guarantee could there be that the imperial par- 
liament would establish a uniform minimum wage? 

2. " Under an Irish Parliament, controlled by 
small farmers, the Factory Acts and the Factory 
Regulations would remain a dead letter." 

The word " remain " is amusing. 

3. " In the South and West of Ireland, where 
industrial development is less complete, labor is not 
organized as it is in Ulster or in England and in 
Scotland and is therefore largely powerless to de- 
fend itself." 

Thus these Ulstermen, from " the only part of the 
country where labor is fully organized and articu- 
late," announce their magnanimous sense of the soli- 

[ 90] 



darity of labor. They do not correlate the defence- 
lessness of labor elsewhere with their own proud 
boast, " the birthright of British citizenship under 
British administration." British administration, 
after all, extends to those forlorn places where labor 
is defenceless. 

4. " With an Irish Parliament in power the 
sweating of labor, which in Dublin with all its con- 
comitant evils of poverty, slums and degradation has 
so keenly aroused your sympathy, will be possible 
in Belfast." The brave Dublin revolt of 19 13 did 
not suggest that Dublin labor would stand still. 

5. " You will find forty-two Irish members at 
Westminster ready to back up their Dublin parlia- 
ment and vote down your measures of fair play for 
the workers. . . . We know that the privileges won 
for the workers of trade unionism are in danger." 
This is a free use of the gift of prophecy. 

Later in April, 19 14, the following additional as- 
sertions were added at a large meeting of Unionist 
organized labor: 

6. Home rule " would cut us off from participa- 
tion in the social and industrial improvements which 
will come to our fellow-trade-unionists in Great 
Britain by reason of the pressure the powerful cross- 
channel labor organizations will be able to exert on 
legislation in the Imperial Parliament." 

So much, at the present, for the economic particu- 
larism of Ulster. 

THE PROSPERITY OF ULSTER 

How Ulster came to be so prosperous under the 
union, when the rest of Ireland wallowed in poverty 
and ignorance, is one of the riddles of Ireland. 

[ 9i ] 



This riddle requires one to recall confiscation, the 
penal laws, the destruction of Catholic capital. The 
enforced degradation of the Catholic Irish during the 
eighteenth century is one of the commonplaces of 
history. Ireland's " industrial activities," Sir Ed- 
ward Carson proclaims, " were strangled by the 
short-sighted jealousy of English commercial in- 
terests." For the short period at the end of the 
century in which Grattan's parliament flourished the 
fortunes of Ireland improved. Instead of savage 
commercial restriction Ireland had commercial en- 
couragement, and with excellent results. Soon after 
the union, purchased by Pitt from the ascendancy 
legislators to give Britain security, the wars ended 
and with them the prosperous agricultural inter- 
lude; and the agricultural Irish, three-quarters of 
the people, headed straight for the catastrophe of 
the great famine. The issue of landlordism, how- 
ever, had been settled in Ulster after 1770, and flax, 
a specialized crop, went forward. Flax gave Ulster 
its industrial foothold. In the last quarter of a 
century the south has once more begun to achieve a 
measure of material well-being, but Ulster had a 
long time in which to associate its superior fortunes 
with the union and to shrink more and more from 
partnership with the retarded south. I do not wish 
to give the impression, however, that I think the 
riddle of Ulster a negligible one. The economic 
imagination of nationalist Irishmen is untrained. 
Their policies are often local and provisional to a 
degree. Their tendency is often stubbornly conserv- 
ative. Under the circumstances there is a case for 
Ulster's particularism. It ought never to be dis- 
missed. 

[ 92 ] 



It ought never to be dismissed because it is the 
business of statesmanship to face problems, not to 
stifle them. So far as Orange Ulster is not merely 
suspicious, superstitious and hypothetical (promising 
to do what Mr. Veblen said Germany actually does, 
" take war by the forelock and retaliate on presump- 
tive enemies for prospective grievances ") it has 
to be dealt understanding, not blows. If Irishmen 
are not willing to say with Sir Edward Carson: " the 
remedy is revolution," then Disraeli's answer must 
be applied. " The Irish could not have a revolu- 
tion, and why? Because Ireland is connected with 
another and more powerful country. Then what is 
the consequence? The connection with England be- 
came the cause of the present state of Ireland. . . . 
What, then, is the duty of an English Minister? 
To effect by his policy all those changes which a 
revolution would do by force. This is the Irish 
question in its integrity." It is the question of all 
government, in its integrity, and applies to Ulster 
as well as nationalist Ireland. 

THE RUIN OF IRELAND 

When Disraeli said that " Ireland is connected 
with another and a more powerful country " he 
clearly naturalized the Irish difficulty with England 
just as he had shown how rebels are made. Because 
England is strong and Ireland weak, their relations 
are essentially difficult. This difficulty does not in- 
here in the character of the English, or the charac- 
ter of the Irish, so much as in their unfortunate 
juxtaposition. If Ireland were a dominant indus- 
trial country commanded by successful men like W. 
M. Murphy, the Dublin capitalist, and England 

[ 93 ] 



were an agricultural country peopled by idealists like 
Charles Lamb, the juxtaposition would be equally 
unfortunate and equally difficult. What creates 
that difficulty is not, as John Mitchel supposed, the 
specially evil nature of the English nation. It is the 
specially evil temptations of power in dealing with 
powerlessness. 

No one can fairly say that the law of life is the 
law of the wolf-pack. Babies are weak, and old 
people are weak, but it is a foible of civilization to 
support them. Neither can one say that the wealthy 
are always unjust and unscrupulous, while the poor 
are always scrupulous and just. This is the most 
enervating fallacy in life — it is pure sentimental- 
ism. It was amiable of James Russell Lowell to 
sing, " Truth forever on the scaffold, wrong forever 
on the throne " — but too many kings have been exe- 
cuted to make it arguable. Yet while powerlessness 
is not necessarily right, neither is it necessarily 
wrong. To explain that injustice is simply the un- 
pleasant aspect of the process of selection is to imply 
that everything which happens is bound to happen, 
and that to bemoan evil is equivalent to bemoaning 
the law of gravity. In a practical world it is saga- 
cious to circumvent evil rather than bemoan it. 
But this is very different from saying that men must 
not fight on the side of the angels. On the contrary, 
it defines evil as a detestable reality against which 
we are made to resist. 

No humanist can read history without a sickening 
sense of its futile and wasteful antagonisms. Just 
as murders constantly take place in an insensate 
quarrel over a mistake in change or a trifling rude- 
ness — usually in hot weather — so nations will go 

[ 94] 



to war over the most paltry disagreements. To say 
that these conflicts are part of a great process of 
selection is fantastic nonsense. A man does not 
kick the dog because of a biological feud. He kicks 
the dog because his wife has whined over his losses 
at cards. The dog is a vicarious atonement. The 
only selection in the case is that he kicks a fox-terrier 
rather than a bull-terrier, for reasons best known to 
the dog. It is just in this discrimination that the 
evil of strength is revealed. When a creature is so 
weak that it cannot hit back, it invites injustice. If 
a " brute " has a " nasty " disposition, no one will 
" meddle " with the brute. But if the brute is weak, 
the brute will suffer. No one who has lived in Ire- 
land has been able to discover the suspension of this 
law. There is nothing, for example, that would fill 
me with greater horror than to be re-incarnated as 
an Irish donkey or an Irish cow. Just out of ig- 
norance and stupidity, an immense amount of suffer- 
ing is inflicted on dumb animals in Ireland. The 
most partisan friend of the Irish tenantry is revolted 
at the injustice of cattle-maiming, and while this 
practice began in Ulster before 1770, it is the worst 
specimen of sabotage in the world. There is some- 
thing not incomprehensible about the idea of murder- 
ing a landlord. A dead gombeen man is a good 
gombeen man. But when the Irish pick out cattle 
for vengeance they put themselves almost in a class 
with imperialists. 

THE ECONOMIC MOTIVE 

But there is this difference between cattle-maimers 
and imperialists. The latter are perverted through 
power, the former through powerlessness. When 

[95 ] 



there is obdurate force on one side, the only possible 
reprisal will be lawless. It is all very well to say 
that militant minorities are venomous, vindictive and 
malicious. But when the strong enforce their will 
regardless of a minority's imperious needs, those 
imperious needs will turn poisonous. " Suppressed 
desires breed pestilence." It is a commonplace of 
human relations that justice between unequals is 
scarcely possible. We respect the plea of an ad- 
versary who can damage us if we slight him. We 
slur the plea of an adversary who is powerless to 
punish. We give a tiger a wide berth. When the 
strong impose their will by the unsparing use of 
arms, the weak either yield in sullen slavery, or learn 
the ways of desperation. When a horrible murder 
occurred during the Irish land war, Robert Louis 
Stevenson wanted to become Ireland's catechist and 
take up residence in the district that was proclaimed. 
It was perilously near priggishness. Subsequent 
legislation has admitted that the land agitators were 
fighting a just cause against a blind and brutal in- 
terest. Stevenson could perceive with startling 
clearness the baseness of Curtin's murder. He 
failed utterly to perceive the wretchedness, the impo- 
tence, the degradation in which that murder spurted 
up like a flame out of poisonous gases. Stevenson's 
was static morality. He applied to the peasants of 
Kerry the standards of his own existence. Had he 
lived in Kerry, he would have regarded the murder 
as the finer Kerrymen did — with horror, with re- 
gret, with comprehension. I do not say that mur- 
der is not murder. Yes, murder is murder. But 
against the cowardly murder of Curtin I set a thou- 
sand cowardly murders perpetrated by the landlords 

[ 96 ] 



of Ireland. In Kerry men were asked to pay rent 
on acres of bog where the potatoes were so few that 
you might have given them pet names. In spite of 
the most Spartan virtue, the most extraordinary 
discipline and heroism, those bogs would sometimes 
yield insufficient for life — and yet the land-agent 
sweated rent out of tenants' bones. And then the 
tenants revolted! They decided to make landlord- 
ism tedious and unpractical, to put their faggots to- 
gether into an unbreakable bundle. In this plan of 
combination, the landlords found a flaw. By in- 
stalling blacklegs, grabbers, emergency men, scabs, 
or whatever you choose to call them, in the place of 
evicted tenants, they were able to preserve their 
sacred right of property. Against these blacklegs 
the sweated tenants of Kerry had no legal weapon. 
The only weapon they had was boycott, the shotgun 
and the knife. They first tried boycotting, and 
starving the blacklegs. When this failed, they tried 
the shotgun and the knife. Seen from the country 
house, these were hideous means of adjusting a 
mere question like rent. But they were the only 
means known to remote and friendless men. And, 
strange to say, they pointed the agrarian moral. 

That moral has been put in a word by Lord Acton. 
When Law and Order told him that " murder is 
murder," he retorted that its spokesmen " do not 
choose to distinguish murder from insurrection." 
I cannot wonder at Stevenson, however. Our 
privileged position seems as natural as an atmos- 
phere. It is invisible when we live surrounded by 
it. It is only observable when we recede from it, 
like the blue of a mountain. 

All through this chapter I have striven to show 
[ 97 ] 



the existence in Ireland of another motive besides 
the obvious political motive. The confiscations, the 
penal laws, the republicanism of Ulster, the land 
war, the tithes, the revolt of Ulster in 19 12, all have 
in them something besides self-interest and privilege. 
But it is wise to seek beneath the nationalism of 
Ulster and the rest of Ireland this skeleton of eco- 
nomics. The skeleton is not the whole of national- 
ity, but without it nationality does not exist. 



[98] 



IV 
THE WAYS OF NATIONALISM 

FISHING AND CATCHING IT 

ONE evening, in a country hotel in Ireland, an 
American friend and myself fell into conversation 
with a visiting Englishman. Unlike many men who 
view strangers as the evil they do not know, he was a 
sociable soul, and he took a fancy to the American. 
He could talk to strangers about real things without 
feeling next morning that he had lost his social chas- 
tity. He was of middle age, just retired on pension 
from the engineer corps in India, and while his stocky 
build, ruddy face, curt nose, and bull-dog set of head 
suggested the fighter, he had a charming, soothing 
voice, and a really winning manner. There was 
honey in the lion's mouth. 

The conversation turned to India, to imperialism, 
to the problems of mastery, to the subtlety and shifti- 
ness of the Hindu. In his quiet voice, the English- 
man explained to us (assuming we were both Ameri- 
cans) the exigencies of authority in India, and I 
remember how impressive he made his account of 
the firmness and fearlessness by which he secured 
obedience to his will. 

He sketched, I remember, one of his own minor 
encounters. He had ruled that two money-lending 
Pathans should be excluded from his railroad shops. 
One day, in the centre of the shop, these two tall 

[99] 



lithe fellows emerged unsuspectingly from behind a 
stalled engine and walked into his arms. That in- 
stant he realized that a thousand eyes were upon 
him, waiting to judge what he would do. To handle 
both was impossible. To handle one was to help the 
other. Without hesitation, he chose the man 
checked between him and the repair pit. Before the 
Pathan could fence, he felled him, into the pit. At 
that moment, he said, his spine was curved to take a 
knife blade in his back. He twisted to avoid the 
blow. But there was no one behind him. The 
other Pathan had fled. This incident had supreme 
value. The thousand eyes reverted to work; the 
white man was the conqueror, or, as we suggested, 
the God. 

To this Englishman there was never a question of 
cooperation with the native. The native was a 
child. It is fatal to give in to a child. The white 
man's authority must be absolute. He must be dis- 
interested and fair, but he must be firm and final. 
He must never apologize, qualify, or recede, and 
when his authority is challenged he must make the 
punishment memorable. In a few words he illus- 
trated his sovereignty — how he gained the natives' 
confidence, took silent cognizance of the refractory, 
humiliated them in his own time and place, gradually 
established his prestige and will. It was a frank 
and far from egotistic confession. He had studied 
the native with an eye single to the service. He took 
pride in his success, but it was the pride of a horse 
trainer who is fond of the horses he has broken, and 
who would disdain the brutal trainer as much as 
the ineffectual. 

From India we progressed to the " little brown 
[ ioo ] 



brother " of the Philippines, to the United States, 
and finally to Ireland. 

This was his first visit to Ireland. He had been 
in the country ten days, and it had resolved itself 
into a prolonged stay at this one hotel for the sake of 
ily-fishing, so that he had kept his undisturbed view 
of the native Irishman. " One is so struck," he 
said with an amused smile, " by their eagerness and 
courtesy. They are so anxious to please one that 
they steal one's own words and hand them back 
with a compliment. But," and he became quite 
grave, " of course I realize that concealed beneath 
their courtesy and gentleness is the deepest treachery 
and cruelty." 

The Englishman did not realize that one of his 
listeners whom he thought a normal human being 
was only an Irishman. When Apollonius looked 
upon the serpent bride, his eye, " like a sharp spear, 
went through her utterly." In a similar manner, 
though without cruel intention, the Englishman 
transfixed me. It would have been all right, per- 
haps, if my American friend had not known I was a 
Lamia. I could then have continued " happy in 
beauty, life, and love, and everything." But with 
our evil national character so exposed to the Ameri- 
can, and with a wink impossible, I was compelled to 
confess. 

" I'm afraid I've given you a false impression," 
I said. " I have spoken as an American, since I live 
there, but I was born and brought up in Ireland. I 
am an Irishman. I am deeply interested in what 
you say, and I wish you would go on." 

Being a God, it was rather hard on the little Eng- 
lishman. He could neither apologize, qualify, nor 

[ ioi ] 



recede. Being a gentle soul, as well as a God, he 
was pained at his predicament, and when he resorted 
to the soft class explanation — that there was no one 
more delightful than the cultivated Irishman, and 
that he meant the uneducated, illiterate peasant — 
I made things worse by bringing forth my " peas- 
ant " relatives. The conversation limped back to 
fly-fishing. 

Most Irishmen, I believe, would have felt so 
angry as to strike the Englishman. I felt, as Mr. 
Chamberlain once said he felt about the attacks of 
William O'Brien, that it was only pretty Fanny's 
way. Hundreds of years before, this theory of the 
Irishman had been formulated by Englishmen badly 
in need of the theory and, once formulated, it had 
swum down the stream of tradition between the 
shores of experience, to be poured out to Americans 
as gospel truth. 

BACK TO MILTON 
John Milton was a great lover of truth. He was 
the invincible ally of justice and truth against " two 
the most prevailing usurpers over mankind, super- 
stition and tyranny." He sought a commonwealth 
" where no single person, but Reason only sways." 
So much did he love justice and truth that he was 
ever enraged against their enemies. Thus the 
royalists were tigers of Bacchus, " inspired with 
nothing holier than the venereal pox." Kingship 
was " an abjured and detested thraldom." Its ad- 
herents had " not so much true spirit and under- 
standing in them as a pismire." When the Ulster 
Presbytery in 1649 spoke of the republicans as serv- 
ants riding upon horses, men who labored " to es- 
[ 102 ] 



tablish by laws an universal toleration of all reli- 
gions which is an innovation overturning of unity 
in religion, and so directly repugnant to the word of 
God," Milton rended them as upstarts, " a gener- 
ation of highland thieves and redshanks admitted, 
by the courtesy of England, to hold possessions in 
our province, a country better than their own." 
Theirs was " an insolent and seditious representa- 
tion," emanating from Belfast, " a barbarous nook 
of Ireland." He could think of nothing worse than 
to identify the Presbytery with the papists. " Their 
own unexampled virulence hath wrapt them into the 
same guilt, made them accomplices and assistants to 
the abhorred Irish rebels." 

When it came to the Irish people, Milton's love 
of justice and reason goaded him to fury. Mur- 
ders, massacres, treasons and piracies were the sign- 
manual of those bloody rebels, " those inhuman 
rebels and papists of Ireland." They were merci- 
less and barbarous, treacherous, sottish and in- 
docible, " a crew of rebels whose inhumanities are 
Jong since become the horror and execration of all 
that hear them." Thus the author of L'Allegro. 

In this spirit of justice and right reason John Mil- 
ton sketched the history of Ireland. " Ancient 
piracies, cruel captivities and the causeless infesta- 
tion of our coast " were the predatory activities of 
the Irish. Their conquerors were warrantably 
called over in " just revenge." " By their own fore- 
going demerits and provocations " exclaimed the 
righteous and God-fearing Milton, " they were justly 
made our vassals." 

To strengthen the cause against the Irish bar- 
barians Milton seized on the appalling fact that they 

[ 103 ] 



ploughed horses by the tall and burned oats in the 
straw. They actually " prefer their own absurd and 
savage customs before the most convincing evidence 
of reason and demonstration; a testimony of their 
true barbarism and obdurate wilfulness, to be ex- 
pected no less in other matters of greatest moment." 

One can imagine, then, the villainy of Charles the 
First who sanctioned the recalling of Poyning's act, 
thus disallieging " a whole feudary kingdom from 
the ancient dominion of England." This was an act 
that put the Irish parliament absolutely under the 
tutelage of the English. Its recall, says Milton in 
that tone of solemn and reverberant horror which 
would so well befit a Roman pontiff, " tends openly 
to invest them with a law-giving power of their own, 
enables them by degrees to throw off all subjection 
to this realm, and renders them (who by their end- 
less treasons and revolts have deserved to hold no 
parliament at all, but to be governed by edicts and 
garrisons) as absolute and supreme in that assem- 
bly, as the people of England in their own land." 

It was consistent that when John Milton turned 
to England he should be equally single-minded, 
equally righteous, equally authoritarian. Those 
who think of England as essentially disciplined and 
stable will scarcely be prepared to understand 
Milton's characterization. It merely proves the 
naivete of those Englishmen who ascribe to their 
race the virtues, if they are virtues, that have come 
with altered circumstance. " I know not therefore 
what should be peculiar to England, to make suc- 
cessive parliaments thought safest," declares this 
advocate of a perpetual senate, " or convenient here 
more than in other nations, unless it be the fickleness, 
[ 104 ] 



which is attributed to us as we are islanders: but 
good education and acquisite wisdom ought to cor- 
rect the fluxible fault, if any such be, of our watery 
situation." 

The idea of subjection, utterly repugnant to Mil- 
ton in his own regard, seemed wholly just and neces- 
sary in regard to the Irish. " They who seek noth- 
ing but their own just liberty, have always right to 
win it and to keep it, whenever they have power, be 
the voices never so numerous that oppose it." So 
he spoke for his own party. But when the Irish 
sought liberty they were " a mixed rabble, part 
papists, part fugitives, and part savages." When 
authority takes this tone, the Irishman is seldom at 
a loss to repudiate it. Even today these words of 
the Cromwellian are potent to arouse an Irishman, 
to incite him against the detestable, the " horrid 
insolencies " of such mailed egoism. But it was by 
no means a tone confined to the republican Milton. 
One can trace it back through Bacon to the very 
first chroniclers of Strongbow's invasion. 

THE KING JAMES VERSION 

In Professor Henry Jones Ford's history of The 
Scotch-Irish in America there is a quotation from 
Bacon in regard to the singular favor of Divine 
Providence by which a work of " supreme pre-emi- 
nence " ("the plantation of the great and noble 
parts of the island of Ireland ") had been put in the 
hand of King James. Bacon owned his view of the 
wild Irish, their " barbarous laws, customs, their 
brehon laws, habits of apparel, their poets or heralds 
that enchant them in savage manners, and sundry 
other dregs of barbarism and rebellion." The mis- 

[ 105 ] 



sion of civilizing the Irish, of bringing light to 
them and at the same time exporting troublesome 
Britons, appealed to Bacon. There was, as Mr. 
Ernest Hamilton says, a chance of " quieting the 
unruly Border country and colonizing Ulster with 
one and the same stroke." Bacon nursed the proj- 
ect and urged the grandeur of the future " when peo- 
ple of barbarous manners are brought to give over 
and discontinue their customs of revenge and blood, 
of dissolute life, and of theft, and of rapine; and 
to give ear to the wisdom of laws and govern- 
ments." 

This was at the beginning of the seventeenth cen- 
tury. But long before, during the first conquest by 
Strongbow, Giraldus Cambrensis had come to real- 
ize the baneful character of the Irish and Irish in- 
stitutions. "This race is a race of savages: I say 
again a race of utter savages. For not merely are 
they uncouth of garb, but they also let their hair and 
beards grow to an outrageous length, something like 
the new-fangled fashion which has lately come in 
with us. In short, all their ways are brutish and 
unseemly. . . . 

" The Creator has done his part in giving them 
of His best; but where there is any call for effort on 
their part they are worthless." 

Their matchless skill in instrumental music de- 
lighted Giraldus. He discoursed upon it at length 
but only the more to urge severe government for 
their light natures. " Whenever, at the promptings 
of their natural fickleness, they dare to break the 
peace, immediately all appearance of mildness must 
be put aside and sharp chastisement follow at once 
upon the offence." For their villainy and foul du- 
[ 106] 



plicity are notable. " The Irish are beyond all 
other nations given to treachery: they hold to their 
bond with no one. While expecting absolute good 
faith from others, their own word, their oath, given 
though it may have been under the most solemn 
sanctions of religion, they daily violate without 
shame or fear. So when you have taken the great- 
est forethought for your protection from danger or 
from loss by receiving pledges and hostages, when 
you have firmly, as you think, cemented the obliga- 
tions of friendships, conferred every kindness in 
your power, and apparently made all safe with the 
utmost vigilance, then begin to fear; for then espe- 
cially is their malice on the watch for its chance, 
since they foresee that, owing to the very multitude 
of your precaution, you will not be on the watch 
yourself. 

" Then will they fly to their foul arts, then to the 
weapons of guile, the use of which they know so 
well, hoping in your confidence to find their oppor- 
tunity of striking an unexpected blow." 

THE UNBROKEN TRADITION 

Is there any connection between these estimates 
of the Irish and the task of holding and governing 
rich colonial territory? So far as barbarism is con- 
cerned, the answer is to be taken from historical spe- 
cialists. The conscientious study of Gaelic culture 
and early Irish institutions has progressed greatly 
in the last fifty years, and the more disinterested in- 
quiries leave little doubt, as I understand it, that 
the men I have quoted were plainly believing what 
they wanted to believe. In regard to character the 
marvelous and incredible fact is that the manner of 

[ 107 ] 



interpreting the Irish people for official purposes 
has scarcely wavered in over seven centuries. Thus, 
in June, 19 14, the office of the inspector general of 
the royal Irish constabulary gave the English chief 
secretary for Ireland the latest colonization verdict 
on Irish character: " Obedience to law has never 
been a prominent characteristic of the people. In 
times of passion or excitement the law has only been 
maintained by force, and this has been rendered 
practicable owing to the want of cohesion among the 
crowds hostile to the police. If the people become 
armed and drilled effective police control will van- 
ish." 

The Irish people " are easily led, and it is the 
more incumbent on government to nip lawlessness 
and disorder in the bud." This is from another 
police official in the full light of the twentieth cen- 
tury. The habit of generalizing about the Irish is 
contagious. The royal commission on the 19 16 re- 
bellion in Ireland contributed numerous wise reflec- 
tions, of which I quote the following: " Irishmen 
no doubt appreciate the maintenance of order, but 
they appear to have an inveterate prejudice against 
the punishment of disorder." 

These are official opinions passed by the servants 
of the crown on the people of Ireland. They are 
still essentially the opinions of colonization. A 
franker and ruder expression of the same coloniza- 
tion sentiments might be quoted from members of 
the House of Lords, and from such organs of select 
opinion as the Spectator and The Quarterly Re- 
view. In recent debates on Ireland noble lords stig- 
matized the Irish people as lawless, treacherous, un- 
trustworthy, crafty and sordid. 

[ 108 ] 



The imperial opinion of the Irish remains con- 
stant. In July, 19 1 6, not two years before con- 
scription, the Quarterly Review declared in regard 
to the recent rebellion, " There have been certain 
points of resemblance between nearly all Irish re- 
bellions. Hatred not only of England, but of every 
sort of government, the love of excitement, class 
jealousies and personal feuds, the romantic ideas of 
a very much larger number whose one object is gain 
— these have usually been amongst the causes which 
have brought rebellion about." 

As to " obedience to law " and " the maintenance 
of order," the intelligent sociologist, as distinguished 
from the policeman, is under no illusions. A gov- 
ernment that packs juries cannot surround political 
prosecution with the odor of sanctity. Lord Mor- 
ley recalls the trial of a Donegal priest and some 
peasants brought to the Queen's county in 1890. 
In a county where there were 57,000 Catholics out 
of 65,000 inhabitants the jury contained no Catho- 
lics. " Not one of the jurors knew Irish," says 
Lord Morley, " and not many of the prisoners knew 
English." It is sufficient comment on the trial to 
say that when Lord Morley came to Ireland as chief 
secretary he exercised clemency. " I wrote a letter 
to Her Majesty," he adds, after noting the unfor- 
tunate coincidence of another crime with this re- 
lease, " for which I shall presently have a return in 
the shape of a sharp remonstrance about law and 
order and the peril of letting desperadoes out of 
prison." 

The " lawlessness " of the Irish people has been 
political lawlessness. The government that packed 
juries, in such cases, was the real prisoner at the bar. 

[ 109 ] 



THE PACKED JURY OF PATRIOTISM 
How seriously are we to take the disparaging 
estimates of the Irish people, to which men like Sir 
Horace Plunkett have given some countenance? If 
the disparagements came from complete outsiders, 
I do not think that they could be dismissed easily. 
The steady condescension of English writers to the 
United States — Mrs. Trollope, Charles Dickens, 
Thackeray, Matthew Arnold and the rest — 
may seem to prove that inferiority to Englishmen 
has for a long time been an unfortunate condition 
of human existence, but these English who berated 
America, stuffy as they were, were really not doing 
much more than returning the current American 
compliment. No great love was lost between the 
two peoples during " the hundred years of peace." 
But the English who hate Ireland — imperialistic 
English, for the most part — do so for deeper rea- 
sons than chagrin and pique. The rebelliousness of 
the Irish under English rule explains most of this 
belief in " the licentiousness and ferocity of a rude 
people." As Franz Oppenheimer has formulated 
it for the general relation of conquered to con- 
queror, " In consequence, therefore, of a simple logi- 
cal inversion, the exploited or subject group is re- 
garded as an essentially inferior race, as unruly, 
tricky, lazy, cowardly and utterly incapable of self- 
rule or self-defence, so that any uprising against the 
imposed dominion must necessarily appear as a re- 
volt against God Himself and against His moral 
ordinances." 

Men like Franz Oppenheimer do not resort to the 
hypothesis of " race." Oppenheimer willingly ad- 

[ no] 



mits that one race is bound to be subjected by an- 
other if the aggressors have " a more advanced 
economic development, possess a more tensely cen- 
tralized power, a better military organization, and a 
greater forward thrust." These conditions were 
fulfilled by England when it conquered Ireland. 
But, except in so far as England has crippled and 
perverted Ireland, the " race " argument is pitifully 
unreal. " The psychology belongs to the stage of 
development, not to the race! " 

It is important to see that this privat docent of 
political sciences in the University of Berlin takes 
note of the corresponding Germanic pretensions to 
superiority. 

" Those philosophers of history," he says in his 
book on the State, " who pretend to explain every 
historic development from the quality of i races ' 
give as the centre of their strategic position the al- 
leged fact, that only the Germans, thanks to their 
superior ' political capacity,' have managed to raise 
the artistic edifice of the developed feudal state. 
Some of the vigor of this argument has departed, 
since the conviction began to dawn on them that in 
Japan, the Mongol race had accomplished this iden- 
tical result. No one can tell what the Negro races 
might have done, had not the irruption of stronger 
civilizations barred their way, and Uganda does not 
differ very greatly from the empires of the Caro- 
lingians or of Boleslaw the Red, except that men did 
not have in Uganda any ' values of tradition ' of 
mediaeval culture: and these values were not any 
merit of the Germanic races, but a gift wherewith 
fortune endowed them." 

Being a German Jew, Franz Oppenheimer may 
[ in ] 



not be thought quite disinterested in regard to the 
possibilities of subject peoples. Allowing for an 
amusing difference of idiom, the English historian 
Hallam says practically the same thing. " If Ire- 
land had not tempted the cupidity of her neighbors, 
there would have arisen in the course of time some 
Egbert or Harold Haarfager to consolidate the pro- 
vincial kingdoms into one hereditary monarchy; 
which, by the adoption of better laws, the increase 
of commerce, and a frequent intercourse with the 
chief courts of Europe, might have taken as re- 
spectable a station as that of Scotland in the com- 
monwealth of Christendom." Not the common- 
wealth of Britain, it may be noted, but the common- 
wealth of Christendom. 

THE IMMORTAL RESIDUE 
I do not wish to insult the Irish, but suppose, for 
a moment, that a hundred years ago you had gone 
for a tour in England and found, among the English 
elite, a thousand new-born babies, what would have 
been the effect of a racial transfer? Say that you 
were an angel; that, like an angel, you had every 
gift of which a burglar is envious — the power of 
entering without being seen, and abstracting without 
being detected. The thousand English mothers fall 
into a peaceful slumber at your will, and while they 
dream of Byron and the new poke bonnet you fe- 
loniously purloin their babies and replace them by 
a thousand nice little Kerry babies, picked up be- 
tween Killarney and Valentia, and wafted to Eng- 
land by a powerful but benevolent west wind. In 
order to save the gentle Englishwomen from too 
extreme a surprise, after their recent arduous ex- 

[ 112 ] 



perience, it would be necessary to have them quite 
oblivious of any difference in their babies. This, 
for a burglar, would be difficult, but for an angel 
very simple. Titania loved Bottom without any 
suspicion of his unusually silken ears. These Eng- 
lishwomen would, for all time, dream a midsummer 
night's dream. They would turn with glad ex- 
pectancy to the cradles of 1814 and behold there, 
with gratified assurance, their darling little English 
boys and girls. When the proud Briton came home 
from the magisterial bench, or the cock-fight, or the 
fox-hunt, or even the Napoleonic wars, he would 
dandle his son and heir without the slightest sus- 
picion of your trick. This, however, would be only 
the preliminary. For the perfection of the experi- 
ment two other things would be imperative — first, 
that the whole world, including the little Kerry fry, 
should be under Titania's optical dispensation; and, 
secondly, that these changelings should be destined 
in due time — between 1834 and 1850 — to be 
guided by your angelic hand, to meet, to mate among 
each other, to rear their offspring under the same 
illusion, and so to preserve their racial character 
under the poetic disguise. You could, then, today, 
review the grand-children and great grand-children 
of these original Kerry boys and girls. 

The original batch of boys would, of course, have 
proceeded through Eton and Winchester and simi- 
lar schools to university. The feminine group 
would have become accomplished young ladies at 
home, eventually gracing once-fashionable Bath and 
Brighton. Started on that plane, where would we 
find their descendants today? The answer is in- 
escapable. You would find the older ones en- 

[ us ] 



crusted with years and dignity. Some of them 
would be among that class whose ideas are ground 
out for them by the Spectator between the upper 
millstone of morals and the lower millstone of prop- 
erty. These would be found among the fatter 
bishops, the Die-Hards in the House of Lords, crea- 
tures living on an all-meat diet, creatures living 
largely on Vichy, squires who have at length dis- 
posed of their gloomy town-houses, and gentlemen 
whose affinity is for beagles. Others would be 
found who had served in India, who had done well 
in the army, who had sat on royal commissions, 
who knew the jungle, who knew Monte Carlo, di- 
rectors of rubber companies with appropriately elas- 
tic shares. Others, no doubt, would have been 
sifted down. In spite of auntish solicitude, moth- 
erly intrigue and fatherly hectoring, they would per- 
force have concluded that the game of Success was 
not worth the candle, and would have declined to 
force their brains to take a trigonometrical, rather 
than an arithmetical, view of the problems of life. 
Drink and the devil would account for some: and 
others, using their wits after losing their annuities, 
might have sunk to the level of parsons and actors 
and doctors and journalists and concert-singers. 
But these would be comparative failures. There is 
a possibility that the introduction of this Kerry ele- 
ment into English life would have occasioned a 
coruscation. Of this I am not sure. Had the dis- 
guise protected Negroes instead of Irish, I believe 
they might have enriched and deepened English 
music, developed English dancing, and given to Eng- 
land a passional literature worthy of d'Annunzio. 
I make no such claim for Kerry, but it is possible 
[ "4] 



that some of them would have effloresced in a mag- 
nificent manner, and added great glory to their em- 
pire. 

Since the women are so often the men of Ireland, 
I believe the Kerry girls would have thriven. 
Would they have upheld the motherly tradition, 
revelled in pietism, petty bountifulness and Marie 
Corelli? Yes, but, always in their disguise, I be- 
lieve they would have taken their part in that keen 
and passionate life which was so conveniently 
masked by Victorianism. 

ANOTHER ENCHANTMENT 
The thousand English babies, however, could not 
be allowed to turn blue in the cold. Their proper 
destiny would be Kerry, and the Kerry mothers, 
ignorant of your substitution, would love, nurture 
and spank their babies just as humanly as the Eng- 
lish upper-class were loving and spanking the Kerry 
offspring. In due course, without an alien associa- 
tion, memory or tabu, these would also meet, in- 
crease, and multiply, thus preparing a beautiful 
anthropological culture for the scientist of 19 14. 
Half of the progeny would, by this, have departed 
for the United States, where, today, in ignorance of 
their blue blood, they would be chewing Wrigley's 
Spearmint gum. The other half of the transplanted 
English descendants would be on their " ancestral " 
estates in Kerry, averaging five or ten acres apiece, 
and would all be speaking with a perfect Kerry ac- 
cent. Some of them would be keenly interested in 
the preservation of Gaelic, the tongue for which 
their mouths and jaws were formed. Most of them, 
men and women, would be valiant nationalists, with 

[ ii5 ] 



a bitter memory of race persecution and eviction. 
Their memory of hardships would go back at least 
700 years, unless they traced their ancestry to the 
Firbolgians, when they would have a grievance 
against the Kerrymen, descendants of the cruel Mi- 
lesian race that exterminated the poor Firbolgs. 
It would be just luck if one of these transplanted 
" Kerrymen " did not, in the eviction days, kill his 
own landlord English brother, or perhaps an orig- 
inal Kerryman, who had inherited an Irish estate. 

All these grafted " Kerrymen " would be good 
Catholics, especially devoted to Saint Patrick and 
identifying Catholicity with their " Irish " blood. 
While their " English " correlates would look down 
on the lower classes and read the Morning Post, 
these would look down on the upper classes and 
read the Weekly Freeman. The " English " group 
would roll in motors. These would look on motors 
as the street-arab looks on a machine gun. They 
would live on uneconomic holdings — a worn car- 
pet of soggy sedge on an obtruding floor of granite 
— to which they would cling with Gaelic tenacity. 
They would prefer, that is to say, to stick to a half- 
submerged raft to drowning in the open sea. They 
would be poor but prolific, with no better tradition 
of husbandry than Kerry commonly affords, and 
would undoubtedly be deemed to lack moral " fibre " 
in not raising themselves by their boot-straps — 
provided they were so plutocratic as to wear boots. 
A few of them would have swum against the stream 
far enough to reach Maynooth, and would have be- 
come fine parish priests. But, whatever they did, 
short of becoming " Castle Catholics," they would 
still be " natives." 

[ n6] 



NATIONAL BEING 

So much, in my opinion, does " moral fibre " de- 
pend on a given heredity. I agree with Henry 
Jones Ford that the emphasis should fall on the 
organization of public authority, not on the make-up 
of a people. And I venture to take his quotation 
from Lecky, regarding the measures which " in a 
few generations raised Scotland from one of the 
most wretched and barbarous into one of the most 
civilized and happy nations in Europe." This is 
Lecky's conclusion, " Invectives against nations and 
classes are usually very shallow. The original basis 
of national character differs much less than is sup- 
posed. The character of large bodies of men de- 
pends in the main upon the circumstances in which 
they have been placed, the laws by which they have 
been governed, the principles they have been taught. 
When these are changed the character will alter too, 
and the alteration, though it is very slow, may in 
the end be very deep." 

It must be quickly added, that the " alteration " 
of character follows laws of its own. Woollen un- 
derwear probably made all the difference in Words- 
worth's nature poetry. Without woollen under- 
wear, he could not have written. But many men 
have taken to woollen underwear without becoming 
nature poets. An institution can hatch an egg, but 
it cannot lay one. 

The struggle for institutions of public authority 
is, however, a sufficient reason for national being, 
and it is probably in respect of this struggle that a 
group becomes a nation. Once the struggle is over 
the nation goes on developing whatever habit and 

[ ii7 ] 



exhibiting what physiognomy its original grouping 
made possible; but the mood of patriotism which ac- 
companies the struggle is definitely approximated to 
the ordering of its institutions. Patriotism is gen- 
erated to promote a group's struggle for existence. 
You can make patriotism out of almost anything, 
provided you have a bit of land and goodwill. Not 
much land is needed and, after a while, you can sub- 
tract the land without impairing the goodwill. Ra- 
cial characteristics are educed either to promote or 
to discredit a race's struggle for existence. Thus 
they vary considerably, according as damages are 
being claimed or admitted. In maintaining racial 
characteristics the bellicose patriot is the prime ex- 
ponent of the will to live. He is an idealist, in the 
sense that he wants qualities without their defects. 
If defects are alleged, he either denies them, or at- 
tributes them to some evil power beyond his coun- 
trymen's control. (In home affairs, he attributes 
them to a failure on the part of his countrymen to 
swallow his own patriotic medicine.) In this man- 
ner you behold that where a nation is admirable 
it is wholly responsible, but where it is odious it is 
powerless. The exact contrary, of course, is the 
case of an antagonistic nation. That nation is fully 
responsible for all its odious characteristics. It 
specializes in odious characteristics. And if, by 
some prodigy, it seems admirable, it is a merciful 
dispensation of Providence. It is the bellicose pa- 
triot who, in England, used to discern the frog- 
eating French, or in France, the loutish, drunken 
English; in Germany, the Russian barbarian, or in 
Russia the sword-clanking German. Since the racial 
struggle, patriotically conceived, is always partisan, 

[ 118] 



the estimates are always partisan. Partisanship 
does not necessarily require a childish and unreason- 
ing mind. It is just one aspect of the will to live, 
the primitive competitive aspect, and competition is 
not, ideally speaking, incompatible with truth. No 
one, however, pretends that in ferocious and cut- 
throat competition men remain microscopically 
truthful. Life, in terms of time, may be supposed 
to pass through three phases: barbarism, civiliza- 
tion and exhaustion — the will to live, the will to 
live and let live, and the will to die. In terms of 
extension it may be supposed to have three ex- 
ponents: the bellicose patriot, the implicit patriot, 
and the effete patriot. According to neat diagrams 
like these, it is possible to be civilized and yet patri- 
otic. But when men are challenged as exhausted 
and effete, they immediately become, or strive to 
become, ruthless and imperious. In doing so, they 
feel wholly justified by the exigencies of competi- 
tion. Certain deep vital instincts, taking in one's 
self, one's family, one's class and one's nation, are 
felt to be stronger and more obligatory than any 
mere judicious-minded arrangement. 

THE PATRIOTIC EFFECTS 

This is not wholly undesirable. And it is natural 
that patriotic partisanship should make the most of 
racial characteristics. The thing to secure is 
homogeneity, and the prejudices to tap must be as 
deep-seated and incorrigible as possible. A certain 
racial mouth, we are told, is moulded for a certain 
racial language. A certain racial stomach is de- 
vised for certain racial drinks. Racial antagonism, 
or criticism, accepts these hypotheses, but reacts un- 

[ ii9] 



favorably. Lesions are discovered in the " fibre " 
of a race, as I have already indicated; certain spir- 
itual tendencies — laziness, unpunctuality, improvi- 
dence, fickleness, hastiness of temper, sensitiveness 
to opposition, vaporish will-power — are detected 
" in the breed." According as one is solicitous or 
antagonistic, these traits are marked good or evil, 
to be attacked or preserved. Since " blood will 
tell," and the present generation earmark the com- 
ing generation, men are urged to safeguard their 
heritage or strengthen their fibre — in the heroic 
hope that if sufficient thought is taken the race will 
gloriously emerge or peaceably subside. 

In virtue of Ireland's life-and-death political 
struggle, in which the terms of national entity and 
national existence have been in constant dispute, it 
is natural that her racial characteristics should have 
been conceived in a more than ordinarily partisan 
spirit. Those characteristics have, of course, been 
determined — 'that is, affirmed — in view of her 
subordinate relation to England. The native esti- 
mate has been shaped under the pains and frustra- 
tions of national struggle. The English estimate 
has been decided by the difficult exigencies of im- 
perial policy. It may be unwelcome to urge too 
readily that some of the dearest conceptions as to 
the Irish are political fiction, that the Irish race as 
deprecated in the Kildare Street Club or as idealized 
by the second generation of Irish in Chicago has 
never existed. Fictions they are, yet, libellous or 
idyllic, they are merely the disguises of a significant 
and irresistible national struggle. 

I do not myself hold with bellicose partisanship. 
[ 1 20 ] 



Nationalism is a divine but maddening liquor, and it 
ends by driving most reasonable men to prohibition. 
And the Furor Hibernicus is not soda-water. The 
danger of nationalism to the Irish people is, in ad- 
dition, its power to distract Irish will from the 
realities that press upon it for mastery. It may be 
admitted today that Ireland excited Norman rapac- 
ity, that her conquest was a classic example of wan- 
ton aggression, outrage by force. But the wanton- 
ness of England's sin against Ireland was not really 
its violation of Irish independence. It was its fail- 
ure to satisfy what that independence protected, the 
consensus of native Irish will. A will in Irishmen 
which England has not satisfied keeps alive the de- 
mand for reparation. It is this, not the onslaught, 
which generates rage and lament, which keeps re- 
prisal and independence before Irish eyes. 

He who sees nations biologically may demur. 
Life to such a man is still the jungle. Each nation 
is a being, in which the vulnerable must be prepared 
to resist or to make disadvantageous peace. Na- 
tions, to his mind, know no appeal against trial by 
battle. The material of which they are composed 
is not the supposititious human nature of the cate- 
chism but the stuff of murder and jealousy, of leap- 
ing appetites and sharpened teeth. Slaughterous 
conflict is the process of selection. The nation is a 
tragi-comic animal driven by needs which at best it 
can only sophisticate. Among the plaintive Irish 
themselves the realist may find no exception to this 
law. The rulers of the small principalities did not 
die in their beds. They mounted or fell by compe- 
tition. The power to compete was the measure of 

[ 121 ] 



their competence. And if the Irish suffered yester- 
day from wanton aggression, the Belgians suffer to- 
day, and England and the English may discover its 
cold logic tomorrow. 

Who will deny that this is part of the truth? 
Man is animal and battle is the animal's process of 
adjustment. But that process is not completed by 
physical victory. By memory and imagination man 
is something more than predatory. Memory and 
imagination extended in him preserve him in his 
group estate, and when he falls he retains within 
him, unlike other animals, an anxious and insistent 
title to the establishment of his group. If his group 
fares ill, his memory and imagination remain to be 
vanquished, and in the degree that exploitation fol- 
lows on aggression, in that degree is confirmed the 
title of his lost dominion. 

THE DANGER OF PATRIOTISM 

It is not the dislocation of national or interna- 
tional adjustments which is the real sin against so- 
ciety. Whether peaceful or violent, painless or 
painful, dislocation is a necessary condition of 
change. Goodwill between groups and classes is 
the balance-wheel of society, but in reaching for new 
understandings goodwill has often to be forfeited. 
The justification of the new understanding, however, 
depends on its power to restore goodwill. And it 
is in this that mere Might fails. 

To start conflict between human groups only one 
thing is needed — the denial of a common will. 
The strong nominates himself the interpreter of the 
weak. He sees his victim as akin to beast or child 
without a right to a will of his own. If the victim 

[ 122 ] 



oppose him, it provides just cause for coercion. Be- 
tween the two there is no equality. The victim must 
submit or be destroyed. 

If a group is exterminated under the regime of 
these presumptions there is no political problem, but 
if the group persists as a group the conqueror is in 
bad case. His intrusion cruelly denied the exist- 
ence of- a common will between himself and his sub- 
ject. His presence vividly maintains that denial. 
In the eyes of his victim he is a demon, implacable, 
malignant. The concept of will that is necessary 
to peace is impossible. His expulsion becomes a 
fixed idea in his victim's mind. Thus conflict gen- 
erates conflict, the beast in one group consecrates the 
beast in another. It is instinct to keep up conflict — 
but the point comes when the intolerance created by 
aggression rebounds on its victim. The point comes 
where the one whose adjustments were violated is 
the one who fails to readjust. That point is reached 
when, in spite of his character as demon, the ag- 
gressor offers restoration and genuinely seeks terms 
of peace. If the defeated refuse to make these 
terms, terms that at last recognize their equal will, 
they too commit themselves eternally to bodily con- 
flict. 

To continue forever to deny the possibility of 
goodwill between peoples in conflict is to declare that 
battle is the only process by which men can find ad- 
justment. It is to deny that reason can ever place 
oppressor and oppressed on a common plane. It 
is to suppose that men learn no lesson from experi- 
ence. It is to suppose that life is a vicious circle in 
which outrage must always be repaid in kind. 

Liberty and goodwill can be taken away on the 
[ 123 ] 



terms of the body. They can be restored on terms 
of the soul. The side that declines those terms sim- 
ply returns the battle to the region of biology. To 
do so is to enslave the present to the past, to make 
animal combat the decisive factor in human affairs, 
to proclaim a lost form of independence the only 
form desirable, to ask for a world in which evolu- 
tion must defer to every status quo. 

Outrage has served one great purpose for the 
Irish. It has made them self-conscious. It has 
burned into their memory and imagination the title 
to their desires. But if they direct those desires 
against an historic enemy rather than toward a so- 
cial goal they will stand in the very light of that 
reconcilement to which their heroic resistance has 
begun to educate their foe. 

THE NEED FOR NATIONALISM 

Yet reconcilement can never take place except on 
grounds that permit the whole people to function. 
This the English know when they think of German 
dominance. This the Irish know when they think 
of English dominance. The principle is equal and 
irresistible. And the history of mismanagement is 
too fresh for Irishmen not to feel contentious as to 
every detail of government. It is for this reason 
that the most detached of Irishmen must admit and 
proclaim his nationalism. 

Because many deep sentiments, especially the 
tribal ones such as patriotism, lead to crass irrational 
partisanship, many persons give them up altogether 
in the first flush of being socialized. It is a little 
like aiming to avoid chilblains by the expedient of 
cutting off one's toes. There is nothing rational 
[ 124 ] 



about one's earliest patriotism. If one is born in 
Green Street one is a Catholic and nationalist. One 
adores Parnell, detests Joe Chamberlain, Queen 
Victoria, the English accent, Tommy Atkins. One 
is even suspicious of afternoon tea. If one is born 
in Orange Street, on the contrary, one is a Protes- 
tant and unionist. The Irish are the dirty Irish and 
they are priest-ridden. One despises Michael 
Davitt and admires the subaltern's moustache. 
One is really interested in Princess Beatrice and is 
excited when she is about to have a baby. This 
kind of patriotism is universal and preposterous. 
It is the bane of humanity. But to give up one's 
group-relation because of these stupidities is only 
possible if one is content to take no group respon- 
sibility and to decline to have any part in community 
political life. To be emancipated in some degree 
from the crasser group-opinion is necessary to any 
one who wants to think freely. A man's freedom 
to speculate, in fact, seems to depend on his freedom 
from immediate responsibility for his native group. 
But back of all the nonsense of group-opinions there 
is the stern fact of group-will and group-necessity. 
And unless one is ready to separate all one's activi- 
ties from one's inheritance it is necessary at times 
to take a part in half-rationalized politics, clumsy 
though the acts of group thought and will. 

To be patriotic need not mean that one cling to 
the ignorant partisanship of one's childhood. It 
need not even mean that one agrees with or sanc- 
tions the behaviour of one's particular ilk. But it 
does mean that the group-relation is recognized as a 
vital relation and that issues which are tried out 
tribally may command a loyalty which is not founded 

[ 125 ] 



on ratiocination. Independent intellectual experi- 
ence is the salt of human conduct. But there is 
more in life than independent intellectual experience 
and in a crisis one fails to be cosmopolite. A man 
discovers himself to be on the side of his group. 

To take thought for the group is not inconsistent 
with accepting it. It is only by that process of 
ratiocination from inside the patriotic impulse, in- 
deed, that the whole necessary patriotic process can 
be redeemed. 

ITS INESCAPABLE IMPORTANCE 
The group in action is not seeking agreement of 
thought. It is seeking agreement of will. To un- 
derstand what a practical man is saying, on this ac- 
count, it is not sufficient to heed his words. His 
words are uttered with a partisan purpose. It is 
essential to identify his party and judge its designs. 
But there is more in politics than the mere clash of 
wills, the rivalry of party programmes and candi- 
dates and meetings and elections, the rivalry of bat- 
talions and guns and men. The game itself, which- 
ever side one belongs to, is a concern about which 
one can speak at large without being partisan. And 
in speaking of it one may fairly aspire to be honest, 
though inevitably in sympathy with a definite group. 
It is my own belief that the superior brute 
strength of Britain, with privileges and vested inter- 
ests at stake, is at the bottom of the trouble in Ire- 
land. Britain has held the scales unevenly and em- 
ployed its force callously to maintain the unequal 
scales. The insurrection of 191 6, for example, was 
not inevitable. It came largely from Irish impa- 
tience and unreasonableness. But when men suffer 
[ 126] 



the baffling injustice that is the common fact in Ire- 
land their madness cannot be marvelled at. Men 
too long baulked in their legitimate dispositions 
have been guilty of greater madness. To see how 
Irish dispositions are being baulked and to suggest 
how those greater madnesses can be avoided are the 
problems Irish statesmanship must confront. 

This attitude is not discernible in the self-inter- 
ested Englishmen I have quoted, from Milton on. 
And yet all except the most unidealistic adminis- 
trators know better today than to obsess themselves 
with racial or patriotic prejudice. " I am entirely 
convinced," said a German ethnologist some years 
ago, " that our late war in South West Africa might 
easily have been avoided, and that it was simply a 
result of the disparagement which ruled in the lead- 
ing circles regarding the teachings of ethnology. 
Taught by bitter experience, we shall now be com- 
pelled to study the native in our colonies, simply 
because he is the most important product of the soil, 
which never can be supplanted by any substitute, and 
must therefore be regarded as absolutely indis- 
pensable." 

This is a nasty philosophy, but it is better than 
the blind brutality of Milton's. It would have been 
well for Milton if he had known and appreciated 
the other mournful German administrator who said, 
" Far too little regard was paid to native customs 
and traditions of life. Instead of studying native 
law and custom systematically, and regulating ad- 
ministration in each colony according to its peculiar 
traditions and circumstances, all colonies alike were 
governed on a sort of lex Germanica, consisting of 
Prussian legal maxims pedantically interpreted in a 

[ 127 ] 



narrow bureaucratic spirit by jurists with little ex- 
perience of law, with less of human nature, and with 
none at all of native usages." 

The evils of this German Machiavellism are not 
on the surface, but between competent and incompe- 
tent Machiavellism the better is the competent. 
The alternative to such manifestations of self-seek- 
ing is an abandonment of imperialism altogether. 
The spiritual aspects of furious contempt and cold 
managerial efficiency are both repellent. If greedy 
colonization has to be undertaken in one or other 
of these moods, then, as President Wilson has told 
the world repeatedly, it is imperative that human 
beings go uncolonized. 



[ 128] 



V 

CATHOLIC AND PROTESTANT 

THE CONTRAST WITH SCOTLAND 

SEEING that England is Protestant and Ireland 
Catholic, it is quite easy to identify Catholic inter- 
ests with Irish interests and Protestant interests with 
English interests. This is one of the simplest ways 
to misunderstand Ireland. Influential above every- 
thing else in the destiny of Ireland, the power of 
Rome has been not infrequently exercised in con- 
junction with the power of England, contrary to the 
desires and aspirations of radical Irishmen. The 
popular allegiance to Catholicism has undoubtedly 
helped to keep Ireland national. The policy of 
Catholicism has undoubtedly helped to keep it na- 
tional unsuccessfully. This intricate contest be- 
tween the three influences — the papal, the English, 
the national, — deserves much more consideration 
than it usually receives. It is too simple to speak 
of Ireland as " priest-ridden." It is too simple 
(though so convenient that we all do it) to speak 
of Catholic Ireland as synonymous with nationalist 
Ireland. England has made much of Ireland's 
Catholicism in intimating the difficulty of ruling Ire- 
land. But often " Catholicism " has been a syno- 
nym for vassalage. The common people in Ire- 
land have never ceased to be the sport of economic 
forces masquerading as religious, and religious 
[ 129 ] 



forces intruding into the political. The complexity 
of this tournament demands an excursion into his- 
tory — where one does so often detect the thumb 
prints of visitants who leave no trace of themselves 
elsewhere outside their contumelious deeds. 

People often wonder, for example, why the 
Scotch-English conflict and the Irish-English con- 
flict should have worked out to such different con- 
clusions. There was nothing different in the an- 
tagonisms. In both cases there was a conflict of 
will. In both cases there was a recourse to force. 
But in Scotland's case the people were already 
trustified, so to speak, on the national issue, while 
the Irish had not, as yet, assumed mastery of their 
fate. The clue is religious. 

It was Scotland's fortune to have had a greedy 
and lecherous priesthood. Delegates of the divine 
Emperor, they pursued not only his interest but 
their own. They were, in the crudest sense, men 
of this world. For a long time the Scotch sub- 
mitted to the church in perfect faith, but gradually 
the church took on the character of a foreign body, 
and the effort to expel that foreign body precipi- 
tated national consciousness. The people made a 
choice between obedience to their hierarchy and 
obedience to what they considered their own ma- 
terial and spiritual good. The choice became prac- 
tically unanimous. It gave the people unity of in- 
terest, and led them to organize their will in gain- 
ing control of the church. In this coordination 
they attained their political majority. 

When the English made onslaught on the Scotch 
they discovered a people who had found themselves. 
They could not be divided to be conquered. The 

[ 130 ] 



result was a self-respecting compromise. It was a 
long while before the Scotch really trusted the Eng- 
lish. Being considerably weaker, they were con- 
siderably suspicious. But England had the tact to 
conciliate Scotland. It had been beaten often 
enough by Scotland to respect its power, and 
although, as Charles Lamb so amusingly illustrates, 
there was a great deal of racial prejudice and mutual 
contempt, the union was respected on both sides, 
and the result was a genuine United Kingdom. 

The Irish contingency came earlier. It was Ire- 
land's fortune to possess a priesthood which also 
was greedy if not lecherous. The divine Emperor 
ruled Ireland through delegates of great political 
power. Religion coordinated the Irish, as it co- 
ordinated the Scotch, but it coordinated them on 
an ultramontane basis. The centre of their being 
was outside Ireland — politically, in Rome. When, 
therefore, the clergy and nobles of Ireland held 
their third national council and sought to repress 
simony and usury, to enforce the payment of tithes, 
and to " put down robbery and rape and bad morals 
and evils of every kind," the Irish were unable, like 
the Scotch, to discount the charges. They accepted 
the Imperial indictment, which gave Henry II his 
excuse to come to Ireland " to reform and build 
up the Catholic Faith, which had fallen down in 
Ireland." 

You have, then, the contrast between a people 
undertaking its reformation from within, involving 
the rejection of external authority; and a people 
whose reformation was undertaken from without, 
involving the affirmation of external authority. 

The result, at first, was politically unimportant. 
[ 131 ] 



Eventually the presence of the English in Ireland 
precipitated national consciousness, and the Irish, 
like the Scotch, " found themselves " in the effort 
to expel a foreign body. It is one thing, however, 
for a people to coordinate in aggression, another 
thing to coordinate in defence. It is one thing to 
marry because you want to, another thing to marry 
because you have to. Ireland's misfortune was that 
an international issue, not a national issue, brought 
her into political being. Her nationalism was born 
out of wedlock — politically an illegitimate child. 

IRELAND A NATION 

It is, I believe, asserted that Ireland had already 
become " one and indivisible " before the Norman 
invasion. This is scarcely true. The Irish nobles 
in the pre-Norman period were a race of petty su- 
permen. Like all simple people they were re- 
ligious, but they were still, in the constitutional sense, 
barbarians. They had not achieved the will to live 
and let live. They believed, that is to say, in ad- 
justing social conflict by force. Much of that con- 
flict was created by incursive Northmen but most 
of it was due to their own decentralization. There 
is not an Irish county which has not been drenched 
in the blood of one set of Irishmen slain by another 
set of Irishmen. In all that halcyon period when 
Ireland was supposed to be an island of saints and 
doctors the Irish were engaged in the perfectly nor- 
mal occupation of that evolutionary stage — a life 
of perhaps glorious but also exceedingly ferocious 
and bloodthirsty competition. Religion existed. 
Men believed in God as children believe in God. 
But while He was Ireland's High-King, He stood 
[ 132 ] 



for faith, not for civil morality. And, after a short 
period of religious zeal, the clergy joined with a will 
in the martial exploitations. Those who have read 
Geoffrey Keating's seventeenth century history, 
whether in Gaelic or English, can have no illusions 
as to the war-loving life of clergy and laity alike. 
On this point, all views are one. " The clan sys- 
tem, in fact, applied down to the eighth or ninth 
century almost as much to the clergy as to the laity, 
and with the abandonment of Tara, and the weak- 
ening of the High-Kingship, the only power which 
bid fair to override feud and faction was got rid of, 
and every man drank for himself the intoxicating 
draught of irresponsibility, and each princeling be- 
came a Caesar in his own community." So says Dr. 
Douglas Hyde. The clergy, like the laity, had the 
will to live, and sought power by barbaric means. 

One aspect of the state is force. In Ireland that 
force was split up into warring units, each used for 
personal aggrandizement with unblushing constancy. 
The clan system was essentially combative, favored 
by a clergy that itself divided to conquer. It is 
fondly alleged that there was something democratic 
in the method by which chieftains were selected — 
on the basis of personal prowess rather than 
hereditary right. No method was more designed to 
promote combat. It was the result of a life without 
centralization and without money economy, an in- 
tensely emulative life. A dynasty was impossible 
in a country where, in a sense quite contrary to Ber- 
nard Shaw's, " the golden rule was that there was 
no golden rule." 

One or two of the Irish kings had glimmerings 
of a national state. They used their overwhelming 

[ 133 ] 



force to compel coordination. They assumed the 
imperial prerogative, and were cruel to be kind. 
But so invincible was the separatism that preceded a 
money economy, so unmitigated the individualism 
of the local clans, so ungoverned their animosities, 
and so subordinate the civic to the religious alle- 
giance, that the princelings resisted all coordina- 
tion. No Bismarck was at hand in early Ireland, to 
cure force by more force, and the clans remained 
private-minded so long as their system remained. 

In this failure to coordinate there is nothing, of 
course, peculiarly Gaelic. And had Ireland been 
protected from colonization by a Monroe doctrine, 
as the unruly South American republics have been 
protected, it would in time have developed its 
autonomy. As it was, it possessed considerable 
amenity of life. Its architecture was attaining dig- 
nity. Its art was developing. Its music was ac- 
complished. Its poetry and literature, needing even 
less concentrated wealth for their fostering, were 
highly advanced. A national personality was 
emerging out of the clan system, as the clan person- 
ality had emerged out of nomad tribalism, and as 
the tribal personality had emerged out of what his- 
torians delight to assert was a cannibalistic individu- 
alism. But the intervention of the Norman, under 
the aegis of Rome, searched out the weakness of 
the Gael. Politically speaking, it was lamentable 
that the Norman had not come earlier, or later. 
Had he come earlier, at the incipiency of Irish self- 
consciousness, he might have successfully aborted 
it. Had he come later, he would have been obliged 
to make terms with it. As it was, he measured the 
Irish by himself, concluded them inferior and per- 
[ 134] 



verse, and started early on the royal road of coercion. 

THE PREDATORY ENGLISH 

When we look back on England's treatment of 
subjected Ireland, we are commonly tempted to re- 
gard the Irish as lambs and the English as wolves. 
This view is favored in Ireland. It can only be 
maintained, however, by having one criterion for 
England and another for Ireland. There was 
nothing lamblike about early Irish history, and I 
submit that the early Irish chieftains were genuinely 
predatory. Had they extruded the invaders, and 
gone on in the natural development of maritime 
power it is extremely likely that, in due course, they 
would have returned the Norman-English compli- 
ment. Raids and forays were in their character. 
It therefore seems sentimental, to say the least, to 
hinge a case against England on Ireland's saintly and 
inoffensive character. It is charming to believe that 
butter would not melt in the ancient Irish mouth, but 
no one who has ever been a member of a contem- 
porary Irish organization can accept this pretty fic- 
tion. Misfortune may have increased the irasci- 
bility of Irish genius, but there is evidence that Ire- 
land always had its Tim Healys and William 
O'Brien, either as irresponsible princelings, Caesars 
in their own community, or else satiric bards who 
lampooned for a living. It was not Irish inoffens- 
iveness that made its subjection unfair. A people 
so incisively individual could never have been in- 
offensive. 

And, if the Irish leaders were never particularly 
lamblike, neither were the English particularly 
lupine. To impute any special viciousness to the 
[ 135 ] 



English character, to suppose them base and inhu- 
man is patently absurd. The experiment seduced 
them, as it has seduced every other empire that 
countenanced enslaving colonization. 

It is easy, now, to say that the English came un- 
der a religious cloak on a secular expedition, and 
so abused the Irish confidence. But, while this be- 
trayal occurred, it does not exculpate the Irish. It 
is simple and beautiful to put one's fate in the 
hands of Providence, to regard one's armed visitors 
as ambassadors of the divine. But this world, as 
the church well knows, is a theatre of war, not a 
young ladies' seminary. The English violated Irish 
independence. Their initial insincerity is still a liv- 
ing and potent tradition. But it never would have 
occurred but for Ireland's dependence on Rome — 
a political naivete, a political ineptitude. 

Up to a certain point, then, Ireland's fortune was 
the fortune of war. In Ireland's history it is known 
that self-seeking was the general rule, and that the 
strong men sought to overcome, and did overcome, 
their weaker brethren, and treated them with no 
particular sweetness or reasonableness. Personal 
aggrandizement was considered just as fair then, in 
the military sphere, as it is now, in the economic 
sphere, and the man who could not fight was re- 
garded as a dastard, a fool or a saint. The Irish 
were not saints. Neither were they dastards. But 
they allowed an enemy to entrench itself in their 
midst, to whom they had to give in, or from whom 
they had to stand out — a problem as bitter as 
death, and incurred in immaturity. 

In electing to stand out, the Irish proved their 
vitality and incivility. It was a serious course to 

[ i36] 



pursue, fraught with permanent consequences in body 
and spirit. A great statesmanship could have re- 
deemed it, time after time, an ability in the English 
to sacrifice their own ambitions and to bend all their 
talents to reconstruction. But through centuries of 
rule the English lacked the disinterestedness of states- 
manship. Resenting Ireland's incivility, they started 
on the doomed policy of coercion, leaving exploita- 
tion unremitted. Before long, a grievance was es- 
tablished of the bitterest kind, which now makes old 
England, like a reformed seducer in one of Hardy's 
novels, wish that the victim and responsibility for the 
victim, were buried at the bottom of the sea. The 
measure of the wrong done to Ireland is the hatred 
of Ireland generated in the heart of the English 
and Anglo-Irish governing class. 

THE WAR OF CHICANE 

So far I have had little need to mention religion. 
The worst difficulty of ruling Ireland often ap- 
pears to be religious, but the religious virus did not 
occasion difficulty from the beginning because as the 
Protestant Edmund Burke irrefutably explained, 
" the spirit of the popery laws, and some even of 
their actual provisions, as applied between Englishry 
and Irishry, had existed in that harassed country 
before the words Protestant and papist were heard 
of in the world." Burke recognized the evils of the 
colonization of Ireland, and the bending of " law " 
to that end. 

" All the penal laws of that unparalleled code of 
oppression," Burke continues, " which were made 
after the last event, were manifestly the effects of 
national hatred and scorn towards a conquered 

[ 137] 



people; whom the victors delighted to trample upon, 
and were not at all afraid to provoke. They were 
not the effect of their fears but of their security. 
They who carried on this system looked to the irre- 
sistible force of Great Britain for their support in 
their acts of power. They were quite certain that 
no complaints of the natives would be heard on this 
side of the water with any other sentiments than 
those of contempt and indignation. Their cries 
served only to augment their torture. Machines 
which could answer their purposes so well must be 
of an excellent contrivance. Indeed, in England, 
the double name of the complainant, Irish and 
papists (it would be hard to say which singly was 
the most odious) shut up the hearts of everyone 
against them. Whilst that temper prevailed, and 
it prevailed in all its force to a time within our 
memory, every measure was pleasing and popular, 
just in proportion as it tended to harass and ruin 
a set of people who were looked upon as enemies 
to God and man; and, indeed, as a race of bigoted 
savages who were a disgrace to human nature itself." 
With the advent of William of Orange, the op- 
pressed became fully identified with Catholicism, and 
thereafter the animus of Irish life was virulently 
sectarian. Those who explain everything by innate 
characteristics may see something more than acci- 
dent in the Catholicism of the common Irish; the 
whole history of Ireland will even seem hideously 
appropriate taken in the light of " the ungodly ethics 
of the papacy, the Inquisition, the Casuists." But 
it is pardonable to return to Edmund Burke before 
admitting this easy reflex from continental history. 
Burke proclaimed in one phrase what the microscope 
[ 138 ] 



of Lecky's long history has corroborated, that " it 
is injustice, and not a mistaken conscience, that has 
been the principle of persecution." " From what 
I have observed," Burke amplified, " it is pride, 
arrogance, and a spirit of domination, and not a 
bigoted spirit of religion, that has caused and kept 
up those oppressive statutes." 

In his famous letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe, 
written from Beaconsfield in 1792, Burke summed 
up the character of the ferocious penal laws that 
ground the common Irish into slaves, in the 
eighteenth century. " You hated the old system as 
early as I did," Burke said to this Protestant advo- 
cate of Catholic enfranchisement. " Your first ju- 
venile lance was broken against that giant. I think 
you were even the first who attacked the grim phan- 
tom. You have an exceedingly good understanding, 
very good humour, and the best heart in the world. 
The dictates of that temper and that heart, as well 
as the policy pointed out by that understanding, led 
you to abhor the old code. You abhorred it, as I 
did, for its vicious perfection. For I must do it jus- 
tice : it was a complete system, full of coherence and 
consistency; well digested and well composed in all 
its parts. It was a machine of wise and elaborate 
contrivance; and as well fitted for the oppression, 
impoverishment, and degradation of a people, and 
the debasement in them of human nature itself, as 
ever proceeded from the perverted ingenuity of 
man." 

The "principles of the Revolution" of 1688, as 
Burke well knew, were declared to preclude Catholic 
citizenship; as the principles of the United King- 
dom have since so steadily been declared to preclude 

[ i39 ] 



home rule. Burke scorned the dishonesty of this 
subterfuge. " To insist on everything done in Ire- 
land at the Revolution, would be to insist on the 
severe and jealous policy of a conqueror, in the crude 
settlement of his new acquisition, as a permanent 
rule for its future government. . . . The Protes- 
tants settled in Ireland consider themselves in no 
other light than that of a sort of colonial garrison, 
to keep the natives in subjection to the other state 
of Great Britain. The whole spirit of the revolu- 
tion in Ireland, was that of not the mildest con- 
queror. In truth, the spirit of those proceedings did 
not commence at that era, nor was religion of any 
kind their primary object. . . . The true revolution 
to you, that which most intrinsically and substan- 
tially resembled the English revolution of 1688, was 
the Irish revolution of 1782," when the Irish volun- 
teers procured Grattan's independent parliament. 

Catholicism did not start the Irish conflict, but 
when the common Irish remained Catholic, it gave 
the garrison a fulcrum for Irish persecution. Sir 
Hercules Langrishe and his friends enabled the 
better-off Catholics to vote in 1793, but the Catholics 
were not emancipated at the union, and the broken 
pledge of Pitt was not redeemed till poor Welling- 
ton had to placate O'Connell in 1829. One can 
guess the size of the " commodious bugbear," the 
pope, by recollecting that Wellington himself was 
immediately accused of " insidious designs to intro- 
duce popery "; and, on the field of Battersea, fought 
an exceedingly comic duel with Lord Winchelsea, to 
avenge the slander. " Wellington fired wide, Win- 
chelsea in the air, and an apology was given in writ- 
ing on the ground and publicly " — an apology which 

[ 140 ] 



the noble Winchelsea had ready in his hat. But the 
emancipation of Catholics, needed as it was, did not 
remove the economic irritant of the established 
church. That irritant kept Ireland in a state of 
monstrous inflammation until the act of 1869. The 
economic hardship of it is well summarized by J. A. 
Froude. " The wealthy Protestant grass farmers 
ought to have been the first to bear the expense of 
the Protestant church. They paid nothing at all. 
[Pasture lands were exempted.] The cost of the 
Establishment fell, in the south, exclusively on the 
poorest of the Catholic tenantry. The Munster cot- 
tier paid seven pounds a year for his cabin and an 
acre of potato ground. The landlord took his rent 
from him in labour, at fivepence or sixpence a day; 
the tithe farmer took twelve to twenty shillings from 
him besides, and took in addition from the very peat 
which he dug from the bog a tithe called in mockery 
1 smoke money.' " 

The grievance may seem slight now, though the 
amount of the Irish land commission's receipts, 
from 1869 to 1913 (£41,630,449), suggests the size 
of the vested interest before the landlordism of the 
church was abolished. The establishment in truth 
was a social ulcer. Almost immediately after eman- 
cipation the tithe war began, a war of merciless 
exaction and terrific reprisal. Sometimes the cow 
of the Catholic priest would have to be seized by the 
tithe proctor. The result was almost invariably a 
frantic peasant resistance. In 1832 there were 242 
homicides. The police, all of whom were Protes- 
tants at that time, reinforced by 32,000 military, 
were constantly employed in aiding the Protestant 
clergy in collecting their tithes. An archdeacon was 

[ 141 J 



stoned to death, a process-server murdered in Kil- 
kenny; at Knocktopher, the home of the Langrishes, 
eleven policemen were killed and seventeen wounded 
in an affray in 1831. In 1832 there was a police 
massacre of peasants near Rathkeeran, County 
Waterford; another pogrom at Wallstown; in 
1834, "the slaughter of Rathcomac." This 
warfare, narrated in detail by Mr. Locker Lamp- 
son in his Ireland in the Nineteenth Century, 
went far to intensify fear and animosity in the coun- 
try, to pave the way for agrarian crimes in the next 
generation, and to strengthen the evil habit of gov- 
ernmental reprisal. Almost nothing was too bad to 
be believed of the Catholic peasantry. The Prot- 
estant " garrison " lived in terror, and " the whore 
of Babylon " was properly berated, especially when 
a rare administrator, Mr. Thomas Drummond, came 
to allow Catholics to be policemen, to prevent magis- 
trates celebrating massacres, and to declare that 
" property has its duties as well as its rights." 

This liberal tendency was thought shocking. In 
the " garrison " Ireland of that period everything 
evil was usually ascribed to the " baneful influence of 
popery," and it is necessary to remember that the 
murders of 1798 seldom left the mind of the good 
Protestant. " I am in Wexford," wrote a charm- 
ing evangelist Miss Charlotte Elizabeth in 1837, " in 
a place where blood cries from the ground with a 
mighty and terrible voice." Miss Elizabeth be- 
lieved that " the turbulent Irish papist, employed in 
cutting turf from a bog, may himself be as effectually 
reclaimed, improved, and rendered fruitful in all 
good things as the bog itself frequently is." But not 
while popery persisted. Miss Elizabeth raised 

[ H2 ] 



mournful eyes to " the great curse of Ireland, the 
foul blot of England's unrighteous legislation — 
Maynooth," the Catholic theological seminary. 
" Take away popery, and Ireland as she ought to 
be will stand out in all the beauty that is now 
shrouded in corruption; all the capabilities that are 
now perverted to the very worst purposes. Bring 
to the Lord the offering of the rescued people." 

" Nothing is stationary: nobody is neutral. Bind 
the victim hand and foot, and fling her yet more 
hopelessly into the iron furnace of Rome: deal blow 
upon blow at the Protestant church, and heap insult 
upon insult on the Protestant people: banish the 
Bible from every school, or mutilate according to 
the worst approved Popish and Socinian patterns; 
leave the native tongue of the most untamed millions 
among the aborigines, to be used by the Romish 
priesthood as an unfailing instrument for exciting 
them to sedition and sanguinary outrage; do all this, 
and as much more as you please, under the false 
colours of liberalism, and the false cant of ' useful 
knowledge.' The result is soon told : you sow the 
wind and shall reap the whirlwind." 

Miss Elizabeth's one consolation was the estab- 
lished church. " Who can contemplate the specta- 
cle of her Christian clergy, maintaining their arduous 
post against every discouragement in the midst of 
persecution, affliction, and distress; of a Protestant 
community, continuing stedfast in loyalty under all 
the varied trials of centuries past, and still holding 
the land for those who give them neither thanks nor 
support, without the strongest emotions of sympa- 
thy, admiration, and respect? " 

It is only when you read Miss Charlotte Eliza- 
[ H3 ] 



beth on the evils of popery that you forget the tithe 
law and understand the proselyting soup-kitchens of 
the great famine. But the effort of the priesthood 
" to rivet the fetter of papal domination on the necks 
of the poor " worked not at all the way this lady 
imagined, so far as sedition and outrage were con- 
cerned. This is perhaps the one anomaly of mod- 
ern Ireland which most requires to be explained. 

PRIEST-RIDDEN? 

The word " priest-ridden " is not unknown to 
Americans. The conflict between the Catholic 
church and the English government, indeed, is per- 
haps the most fixed underlying conception in regard 
to Ireland, and perhaps the most disturbing to the 
conscientious outsider. Unhappy thoughts of Que- 
bec, of an ignorant population and an implacable 
clergy, fall like shadows across the hopes of the true 
republican. So long as a separatist body is so pow- 
erful as the church, a body offering irreducible oppo- 
sition to the ideals of the liberal state, it is prac- 
tically impossible for such liberals to think of Ire- 
land with equanimity. 

This stubborn conflict is largely a phantasm. If 
the Catholic church in Ireland were as nationalistic 
as all this, the fate of Ireland would certainly be 
complicated; but the efforts of the English govern- 
ment to do business with the Catholic hierarchy, irre- 
spective of the desires and needs of the radical Irish- 
man, have been attended with considerable, even re- 
markable, success. Individual Catholic prelates 
have shown strong patriotic spirit on occasion. In- 
dividual priests have died with weapons in their 
hands, rebel leaders and inciters to rebellion. But 

[ i44 ] 



the main record of the Catholic hierarchy is a record 
of smooth self-seeking, with the interests of Ireland 
discreetly subordinated. The hierarchy, as is well 
known, favored the union between Ireland and Eng- 
land, with the promise of Catholic emancipation to 
soothe them. The hierarchy submitted to the Eng- 
lish government's veto on their own membership and 
but for Daniel O'Connell's hullabaloo would have 
confirmed that veto. The hierarchy condemned 
Fenianism, stood by the landlords and rent-collecting 
at the time of the great famine, and obeyed the land- 
lord embassy at Rome in taking an early stand 
against Parnell. Sir Robert Peel did not apply to 
Gregory XVI in vain, and when Gladstone desired 
to have priests " silenced," he was allowed to take 
the ear of the Vatican between his palms. The 
" plan of campaign," an anti-landlord programme, 
was denounced by the papacy. As a companion to 
these compliances, the church extended its control of 
primary education and won the pious approval of 
the Catholic Tories of England. The quid pro quo 
inflamed the proselyters, as Miss Charlotte Eliza- 
beth attests, but the English government had by that 
time come to find manipulation more convenient than 
antagonism. 

PLAYING THE GAME 

No Protestant government is incapable of prac- 
tical arrangements with the Catholic church. The 
late Freiherr von Bissing, governor-general of Bel- 
gium, left his instructive programme for the manipu- 
lation of the church in Belgium. " Church ques- 
tions in Belgium," he wrote in 1917, "have often 
been described as extremely serious. I admit that 

[ i45 ] 



precisely the Germanic provinces of Belgium, which 
once defended their Protestantism so heroically, are 
today far more convinced adherents of the Catholic 
church than are the easily-moved Walloons; any Ger- 
man statesman who is appointed to control the Ger- 
man administration in Belgium must realize that 
Catholicism is, and will remain, a strong and living 
force in Belgium, and that among the most impor- 
tant requirements for successful German work is an 
intelligent regard for the Catholic church and its 
disciples. 

" The problem of our influence upon the schools 
can be solved in agreement with the clergy, if obliga- 
tory religious teaching is introduced in the same way 
as the general obligation to attend school; there are 
a number of points of contact and agreement be- 
tween the future German administration and the 
Catholic clergy, which must learn more and more 
to understand that the Catholic church enjoys, and 
can enjoy, under the power of Germany, protection 
quite different from that which it will have if Bel- 
gium, under French influence, turns towards a com- 
pletely Radical philosophy." 

The German, as usual, manages to promote de- 
cency by making his practical politics sound so cut- 
throat; but without any pronounced heel-clicking a 
policy quite similar has often been pursued in Ire- 
land. Up to 1880, certainly, there was no marked 
success in the efforts of the Catholic hierarchy to 
get educational favor from the English government. 
Before the emancipation, as Father Corcoran's ad- 
mirable study shows (State Policy in Irish Educa- 
tion, 1 536-1 8 1 6), the one idea of Irish education 
was brutal proselytizing, and that purpose distracted 

[ 146 ] 



the national school system long after general reli- 
gious and secular teaching was put into effect in 
1 83 1 . But by 1880 the common schools were assim- 
ilated to sectarianism. Schools where Catholics and 
Protestants mingled had been largely eliminated, with 
the Presbyterian clergy and the Catholic priesthood 
managers of their respective segregate schools. 
While cherishing this great object, the hierarchy 
could scarcely afford to antagonize the government, 
and nationalists like Michael Davitt made no secret 
of their impatience with the bishops. " A very few 
of them are moderate Nationalists," he said con- 
temptuously in 1904. "The majority are, if the 
truth were known, more against than for home rule." 
All through the nineteenth century the opposite 
had been readily supposed by outsiders, but almost 
every test has clearly revealed the hierarchy's obedi- 
ence to " law and order " and their response to Eng- 
land's intervention at Rome. Certainly up to the 
present war the Vatican has yielded to many English 
suggestions and counsels. Sometimes, as in the case 
of Wellington's friend, Dr. Patrick Curtis, an Eng- 
lish foreign secretary has actually secured the ap- 
pointment of the Catholic primate, but usually the 
English government has acted through Rome itself. 
" The interferences of Rome in Irish affairs of a 
non-religious nature," declared Michael Davitt, 
" have been invariably antagonistic and injurious, 
either in their direct motives or indirect consequences. 
. . . The secular or political effects upon Ireland of 
Roman intervention have generally been selfish, 
short-sighted, or unfair." The flagrant attempt to 
stop land agitation was of course uppermost in 
Davitt's mind. 

[ 147 ] 



One might suppose that during the tithe war or 
during the great famine the clergy would have led 
the people to assert themselves. Mr. Locker 
Lampson cites strong opinions to the contrary. 
" The Roman Catholic clergy, as a body," declared 
Goldwin Smith in regard to the tithe war, " were 
perfectly blameless; not only so, but in spite of the 
terrible temptations to play the demagogue under 
which they were placed by the iniquity of the code, 
they arrayed themselves on the side of the law. 
Their own dues were, in fact, sometimes the object 
of attack, as well as the tithes of the Protestant 
parsons." Palmerston was quite certain that the 
clergy were fanning discontent in 1847, an ^ ne sent 
Lord Minto to assure the Vatican that " at present 
in Ireland misconduct is the rule, and good conduct 
the exception in the Catholic priests, and that their 
general attitude was disgraceful, instigatory to mur- 
der and disorder." What more could the dema- 
gogue hope for? But Lord Clarendon, the viceroy, 
belied Palmerston. " With respect to the priests, I 
must again report that, as a body, there is not in the 
world a more zealous, faithful, hardworking clergy, 
and most of the older priests are friendly to order, 
to education, and to the general improvement of the 
people. There are, however, some unfortunate ex- 
ceptions, but it is among the younger clergy, the 
curates and coadjutors, that the real mischief-makers 
are to be found." 

MAKING MISCHIEF 

Mischief-maker is a relative term, as is " general 
improvement." What Lord Clarendon meant, of 
course, was that the clergy were not making mis- 

[ 148 ] 



chief for the viceroy. They were, at the same time, 
playing havoc with the starving peasantry during the 
great famine. We know that when the potato crop 
failed the grain crop did not fail, that the landlords 
took the grain crop for their rent, that vastly more 
grain was exported for sale than was imported for 
charity, and that the priests authorized and urged 
this rent-paying. An eye-witness, John Mitchel, 
tells what this meant. " At the end of the six years, 
I can set down these things calmly; but to see them 
might have driven a wise man mad. There is no 
need to recount how the assistant barristers and 
sheriffs, aided by the police, tore down the roof-trees 
and ploughed up the heaths of village after village — 
how the quarter acre clause laid waste the parishes, 
how the farmers and their wives and little ones in 
wild dismay, trooped along the highways — how in 
some hamlets by the seaside, most of the inhabitants 
being already dead, an adventurous traveller would 
come upon some family eating a famished ass — how 
maniac mothers stowed away their dead children to 
be devoured at midnight. ... — how the ' law ' 
was vindicated all this while; how the Arms Bills 
were diligently put in force, and many examples were 
made; how starving wretches were transported for 
stealing vegetables by night; how overworked coro- 
ners declared they would hold no more inquests; how 
Americans sent corn, and the very Turks, yea, Negro 
slaves, sent money for alms; which the British gov- 
ernment was not ashamed to administer to the ' sister 
country ' ; and how, in every one of these years, '46, 
'47, and '48, Ireland was exporting to England, food 
to the value of fifteen million pounds sterling, and 
had on her own soil at each harvest, good and ample 

[ 149 ] 



provision for double her own population, notwith- 
standing the potato blight." 

The peasants obeyed the older priests, " friendly 
to order," but there was a limit even to this " priest- 
ridden " obedience. When, after the famine of 
1 879-1 880, the Parnell movement began to show 
the peasants a way out, the church tried once to 
interfere in the interests of order and property. In 
1883 Rome commanded the clergy to boycott the 
Parnell testimonial. Up to that time £12,000 had 
been subscribed. The pope's manifesto was read to 
the people, with the effect that the dribbling sub- 
scriptions swelled to a torrent, and £39,000 was 
presented to Parnell. This was one of those papal 
efforts " to curb the excited feelings of the multi- 
tude " that misjudged the degree to which the Irish 
are docile. I am speaking here, of course, of na- 
tionalist docility. There is a municipal docility on 
which the priests have generally been able to count. 

A special study of Vatican politics might reveal the 
source of many strange variations in the action of 
the Irish hierarchy. The one thing certain, how- 
ever, is the special character of the church's interest 
in Irish politics. Sometimes it coincides with the 
interest of the majority of the people. More often 
it is narrowly interpreted, either with a view to a 
particular object to be gained from England or with 
a view to obeying the able English Tories at the 
Vatican. It is never disinterestedly patriotic, despite 
the warm allegiance of the Irish people. Where it 
seems to be most " nationalistic," the nationalism is 
subordinate, except among the less institutionalized 
younger clergy. 

[ 150] 



THE PROBLEM OF AUTHORITY 

This may sound like an intransigent interpretation, 
obeying an Irishman's supposed bias against law and 
authority. That would be foolish. Without au- 
thority, organization is impossible. The man who 
resists authority, as such, foregoes civilization. 
There can no more be civilization without obedi- 
ence than there can be clocks without screws. Nor 
is organization possible without items of injustice. 
The man who disowns authority the minute he expe- 
riences injustice is a child. No organization can be 
a perfect expression of personal will. No author- 
ity can stop to consult the personal preferences of all 
its members. Even a picnic involves disagreeable 
subordinations. And when the thing to be built is, 
say, a Panama Canal, not a sylvan bonfire, the very 
job itself requires sacrifice. If people are unwilling 
to make sacrifices for a useful common object, they 
merely choose a permanent enslavement to circum- 
stance rather than a temporary enslavement to pur- 
pose. Like a child, they put wilfulness before will. 

But what sanctifies authority is the common object 
it subserves. And the great danger in church au- 
thority is clearly its desire to substitute its special 
for the common will. To get momentum, authority 
is absolutely obliged to resist certain kinds of inter- 
ference. It is obliged to demand a free hand. But 
the unbridled will is exactly the mark of the despot, 
and when authority is allowed to assert its own limit- 
less and irrevocable will, the man who accepts it is a 
slave. Authority may seek obedience as lovingly as 
a parent. It may persuade itself that it has the 
common object in mind. But once it grows to judge 

[ I5i ] 



for its children without hindrance in its own field, 
it will feel able to extend the field. The appetite of 
authority is greedy. Its sophistries are incalculable. 
Its only formidable foe is democracy, which insists 
that all government must derive from the consent of 
the governed. 

With these platitudes in mind, it should be easy 
to understand the Irish attitude toward authority. 
There is no hatred for " law" in the passion for 
home rule. Only a country of slaves could submit 
to Crown Colony government. All through Ireland, 
one is reminded of the insolence, the entrenched and 
armored insolence, of Dublin Castle. With no 
power to qualify or revise the authority of the bureau- 
cracy, with no power to use government for the pur- 
poses of local welfare except it pleased the whim of 
authority, Ireland has seethed and writhed and 
cursed like a tortured child. When Dublin Castle 
meant well, it found no goodwill in the country. 
Centuries of despotism had destroyed goodwill. 
The deepest hatred exists today, although latent, for 
the authority of Dublin Castle. 

But unbridled will is not confined in Ireland to 
Dublin Castle. The people who hate Dublin Castle 
were obliged to find an organization of their own, 
an organization of national will. They developed 
this organization in the parliamentary party. And 
the parliamentary party, devoted to the common 
object of home rule, soon developed the greedy appe- 
tite of authority. Being an organization of popular 
will, with a careful system of delegates, it has ex- 
tended its field over all popular activity, and done 
its best to destroy free thought. To secure immu- 
nity from this monster, every other organization is 

[ 152 ] 



constrained to declare itself non-sectarian and non- 
political — to begin by protesting its innocence. But 
thought leads to will, and the parliamentarians have 
undoubtedly striven to destroy free thought. Thus 
there is the spectacle of parliamentary interference 
with every organization that asserts its independ- 
ence. The trepidation of Dr. Douglas Hyde, when 
president of the Gaelic League, was one of the typical 
results of overweening parliamentarianism. For 
years the parliamentary party took the suspicious 
attitude toward the Gaelic League that a publican 
would take toward a confectioner. They regarded 
subscription to the Gaelic League as money filched 
from their war-chest, energy diverted from their 
sacred cause. The Abbey Theatre was another vic- 
tim of political despotism. The Abbey Theatre 
dared to fiddle while the parliamentarians burned. 
Culture was a political irrelevance. 

But if the parliamentarians asserted dominance 
over poets and philologists, they had a rival in the 
ruling genius of the Catholic church. Free thought 
was discouraged by the politicians for tactical rea- 
sons. It has long been discouraged by the contem- 
porary leader of the hierarchy, on principle. Any 
man who dared to disagree with this prince of the 
church was treated with the brutality of a strong 
man spoiled by sycophants, parasites and cowards. 
In him there was an insolence worse than the inso- 
lence of Dublin Castle. A bull in Ireland's intel- 
lectual china shop, he snorted, bellowed and raged 
at the very existence of a thought not his own. Most 
churchmen oppose opinion indirectly. The Irish 
cardinal was a professed and truculent obscurantist. 
To the episcopal palace he translated the tactics of 

[ i53 ] 



a tyrannical peasant dealing with dependent chil- 
dren. It was once said that a group of railroad 
directors without J. P. Morgan were like cows with- 
out a bull. The leader of the prelates has had much 
the same relation to his colleagues in Ireland. 
When he tried to gore Sir Horace Plunkett, there 
was no man amongst them to say one disinterested 
word. The truth meant nothing to him. If it 
meant anything to any of the others, they said noth- 
ing — merely trembled in their petticoats. 

It is this aspect of authority, if no other, that 
makes the ultramontane character of Irish Catholi- 
cism so serious. But loyalty is not likely to permit 
any contumacy or modernism until there is no fur- 
ther constitutional use for the solid Catholic major- 
ity in Ireland. It is the absence of home rule that 
has saved the church from anti-clericalism. Once 
home rule is established the church must be pre- 
pared for a new mood in Ireland. 



T 154 ] 



PART III 
CONSEQUENCES 

You read her as a land distraught, 

Where bitterest rebel passions seethe. 
Look with a core of heart in thought, 

For so is known the truth beneath. 
She came to you a loathing bride, 

And it has been no happy bed. 
Believe in her as friend, allied 

By bonds as close as those who wed. 

George Meredith. 



VI 
THE ECONOMIC LEGACY 

BURYING THE PAST 

JN EARLY everything that has been said, so far, he- 
longs to the past, and it seems uncharity to dwell 
upon it. Among nations that are united today, 
either by amity or by law, there are many that were 
once in murderous opposition, sundered by declared 
war or by revolution. No history could be more 
bloody than that of England and Scotland, and yet 
the most loyal Scot thrilling to the name of Wallace 
or heartened by the thought of Bruce is just as ready 
to die for Britain as a Percy. England and the 
United States rise above remote conflict and recent 
friction. England and France make common cause. 
It is in the character of nations, as of persons, to end 
quarrels and compose differences, and let the dead 
bury the dead. To refuse to do this, to cling to 
grievance, is not merely morbid and vicious; it vio- 
lates the social principle and prohibits sanity. 

It would not be difficult to make a long list of 
modern Irishmen who, within the British empire, 
have found it entirely possible to have honorable 
careers. Leave aside such Protestant Irishmen as 
have come to the top in the British army and navy — 
descendants of the colonization even if, as in the case 
of Wellington or Lord Roberts, their families had 
been in Ireland for hundreds of years. Leave aside 

[ i57 ] 



such Protestant Irishmen as Bernard Shaw and W. 
B. Yeats and John Synge and Oscar Wilde and A. E. 
and that celebrated Episcopalian convert (or is it 
Anabaptist?) George Moore. There is still a nota- 
ble list, Irish and papist, of men who found that 
their heredity was no fatal barrier within the empire. 
Lord Charles Russell of Killowen, Lord MacDon- 
nell of Swinford, Sir Gavan Duffy, Sir William But- 
ler, are among the first to drift into the mind, men 
promoted to high office within the governmental 
scheme itself and not at the cost of disavowing na- 
tionality or religion. 

Why is it, then, that Irish nationalists scorn the 
suggestion of Sir Horace Plunkett — Irish history is 
a thing for Englishmen to remember and for Irish- 
men to forget? Why is it that the past, the musty 
past, is a living reality for Irishmen, a memory with 
a sabre tooth? Is it Celtic contrariness, or Celtic 
mystery, or Celtic twilight? Why do Irishmen in- 
sist on the past? Careers await them within the em- 
pire. The empire itself awaits them, as it awaited 
the Scotchman. Why do they not reach out the fra- 
ternal hand? 

THE ENGLISHMAN SETS HIS JAW 
The answer is, of course, partly psychological. 
For all his great gifts, the greatest gift of the Eng- 
lishman is not putting himself in the alien's place, 
and at any moment he is likely to revive all the past 
by some act of stupid and unimaginative selfishness. 
But a deeper explanation than this must be brought 
forward. The absence of considerateness is a hard 
fact of life; it is not only what every Irishman knows 
[ 158 ] 



but what every Chinook knows, one of the grim 
proofs of man's " inherent vice." There is a more 
concrete reason why the past is a living reality in 
Ireland. It is the effect in practice, sustained and 
persistent and inflammatory, of English privilege and 
self-preference in Ireland. If the harmful conse- 
quences of the past were not tenderly nursed and 
protected, there would be no Irish question today. 
But while the Englishman often makes the most ade- 
quate acknowledgments of the sins of his grand- 
fathers, he does so in the persuasion that verbal 
atonement suffices. The grubbing act of restitution, 
the tedious amendment of the past in terms of pres- 
ent advantage and present increment, is always 
slowly undertaken and is frequently beyond his com- 
prehension; so that the more impatient Irishman calls 
him a hypocrite and wishes him tortured in hell. It 
is astounding to a good Englishman, ready to admit 
stupidities and even crimes, that his sense of justice 
should be called into question. He feels just. He 
has always paid his way scrupulously, met his obli- 
gations promptly, kept his appointment punctually, 
changed his linen regularly, and added charity as a 
moral bouquetiere. Why, then, should a boisterous 
Irishman be so ready to point a blunderbuss at his 
head? The situation is so offensive to the good 
Englishman that he is quite ready to pigeonhole the 
code he employs in dealing with equals and to open 
up the code he is forced to employ in dealing with 
inferiors; the code that Germans call "blood and 
iron," that Irishmen call coercion. The manner of 
the accuser, unfortunately, is rather likely to reach 
the Englishman's amour propre before it reaches his 

[ 159 J 



sense of justice ; and if self-respect is called into ques- 
tion before anything else, he declines to argue. He 
even, unchristianly, sets his jaw. 

SICK EGOISM 

But setting one's jaw is a preposterous way to meet 
the situation, either for Englishman or for Irishman, 
except in the actual tug of war. The Irishman's 
mere anger is natural but impotent. The English- 
man's self-respect is, beyond doubt, an admirable 
fixture, but it is no more entitled to interpose itself 
between the critic and the facts than a lady's modesty 
to interpose itself between her physician and her ail- 
ment. Self-respect is commendable, provided the 
proportion of self in it is strictly regulated. Other- 
wise it goes into the irrational class with divine right, 
manifest destiny, Deutschtum and the rest. It is, 
that is to say, the disguise of a sick and greedy ego- 
ism. It is only a sick egoism that cannot afford to 
have its motives turned inside out and rationalized. 

A tenderness for England has led to some 
amazing promenades of self-respect in the last few 
years. Mr. Arnold Bennett, for example, went to 
Dublin Castle in 19 17 to learn exactly what Ireland's 
remonstrance against Dublin Castle was, and he 
cabled his opinion to the United States that the worst 
offence of Dublin Castle was its habit of permitting 
dossiers to be written on both sides of the paper. 
It was a thin joke to spread over so vast and so 
discredited a bureaucracy. Since it was denounced 
by Joseph Chamberlain thirty years ago little has 
been done to reform Dublin Castle. It is only a few 
years since President Lowell of Harvard made un- 
equivocal criticism of British administration in Ire- 
[ 160] 



land. The effort of so honest an Englishman as 
Arnold Bennett to play ostrich in this predicament 
shows the overwhelming difficulty of being dispas- 
sionate. Mr. Austen Harrison of the English Re- 
view, indeed, refused to behave as Mr. Bennett did. 
Unlike Bernard Shaw in urging the expedient of a 
branch-office home rule, he did not try to juggle 
water on both shoulders. But the candor of Mr. 
Harrison is in extraordinary contrast to the nimble- 
ness of patriots and propagandists for whom, at the 
moment, truth was in the second place. 

TRUTH IN THE FIRST PLACE 

Until truth is put in the first place and kept there, 
no Irish policy can be a broad social policy, no Anglo- 
Irish goodwill can be a sound goodwill. The tinkers 
and handymen have been trying for centuries to 
mend the Irish trouble while glossing just those evils 
that cause the Irish trouble. This is political idiocy. 
Until the men and establishments that have a vested 
interest in the perversion of Irish life, in the mal- 
formation and distraction of the Irish community, 
are identified and deposed by statesmanship, it is ut- 
terly useless to talk of making Irish history tolerable, 
or burying the past. The past is a corpse tied to 
living Ireland. Neither Mr. Bennett's enamel nor 
Mr. Shaw's chaste kisses can change its nauseating 
properties. The bonds of that foul corpse have to 
be severed before it can be interred and forgotten. 
How was the union with Scotland kept from fester- 
ing? How was the entente between France and 
England matured? Only by a recognition of mutual 
will, a consideration of mutual advantage. Mr. Ar- 
nold Bennett spends four days among the records of 

[ 161 ] 



Dublin Castle, and loudly testifies that the interests 
of Ireland are secure. The interests of Alsace- 
Lorraine, would not the German bureaucratic rec- 
ords convince Herr Sudermann that the interests of 
Alsace-Lorraine are well taken care of? It is not 
in this fashion that truth is pursued. 

POUNDS AND PENCE 

There is nothing wistful, nothing imponderable, 
about an economic disadvantage, and I propose to 
submit at the beginning one frank and brutal argu- 
ment why Ireland should not have home rule. It is 
not my own argument. It is the argument of Mr. 
Austen Chamberlain, part of that case Against 
Home Rule prepared before the war (1912) by 
Lord Londonderry and Sir Edward Carson and Mr. 
Balfour and Earl Percy and Lord Charles Beres- 
ford, edited by S. Rosenbaum. I give it in Mr. 
Chamberlain's own words : 

11 We do not always sufficiently realize that on the 
other side of the St. George's Channel lies a country 
whose annual imports amount to sixty-five millions 
sterling. Even less do we realize that one-half 
(thirty-two millions sterling) is the value of the im- 
ports of manufactures, mainly British, into Ireland. 
This trade in manufactured goods is not only already 
enormous, it is rapidly growing. It has increased by 
more than four millions in four years. Any ill- 
considered legislative measure [home rule] which in- 
terfered with or disturbed this great volume of trade 
would no doubt cause serious loss to Ireland; but it 
would bring bankruptcy and disaster to many British 
firms and their workmen." 

You perceive the statesmanship. Ireland con- 
[ 162 ] 



sumes £32,000,000 worth of British manufactures a 
year. It is an excellent market for the British man- 
ufacturer. If an " ill-considered " measure like 
home rule should be passed, this consumption of 
manufactured goods might be " interfered with or 
disturbed." Therefore, British workmen, see where 
5'our interests lie. Vote against home rule. 

What did Mr. Chamberlain mean by " dis- 
turbed " ? It is possible he thought that home rule 
might derange the confidence of the British manu- 
facturer, or might render the Irish consumer incom- 
petent. But real " disturbance " could only mean 
one thing to Mr. Chamberlain, the building-up of 
Irish manufactures under home rule, and the conse- 
quent falling off of imports. It is here that the 
frank brutality of the Birmingham millionaire came 
in. As a British statesman, an apologist for the 
union and an exponent of its benefits to the Irish, he 
preferred to see the Irish kept in an artificial non- 
productiveness to seeing them taken out of the zone 
of British ministerial supervision and costly private 
bills and placed in a zone of self-knowledge and self- 
help. The consideration, in this instance, was not 
the feebleness and worthlessness of the Irish, espe- 
cially the southern Irish. It was not the uselessness 
of aiding the Irish to help themselves. It was the 
naked fact that Ireland was one of the best cus- 
tomers of the British manufacturer, a customer that 
made no demands on England in respect to her cus- 
tom but that consumed, obediently and unquestion- 
ingly, £32,000,000 worth a year, " rapidly grow- 
ing." Should the House of Commons interfere with 
this stream of trade by any " ill-considered " meas- 
ure? Never, if the statesmanship of Mr. Austen 

[ 163 ] 



Chamberlain were consulted. The profit on £32,- 
000,000 per annum, rapidly growing, ought not to 
be thrown away. 

THE IMPERIAL BACKYARD 

But what has the British government to do with 
this? In what degree is this huge annual import a 
sign of anything except British enterprise and Irish 
sloth? Now that democracy is largely economic 
this question is worth asking, and the emphatic Irish 
answer worth hearing. The withholding of home 
rule and fiscal autonomy is often represented as a 
question of no great practical moment, and Ireland's 
protests in this respect are often taken as sentimental 
and negligible. But the realities underlying home 
rule have more than patriotic passion in them. 
They are matters of economic life and death. 

I go back to the outspoken Mr. Chamberlain. 
" The commercial, banking, and railway systems of 
Ireland are intimately associated with those of the 
greater and more firmly established systems of Great 
Britain. Irish railways are so largely controlled at 
the present time by British concerns, and there exist 
so many agreements and understandings between 
them and British companies as to facilities and rates, 
that they might be regarded as part of the same net- 
work of communications. Hardly less close are the 
relations which now exist between British and Irish 
banks." 

The subject of British and Irish banks I shall 
leave aside, merely saying that Irish deposits have 
always kept slinking to foreign investment via Lon- 
don. This benign intimate railway association 
which Mr. Chamberlain is so anxious should remain 

[ 164] 



undisturbed is a more pregnant topic. It illustrates 
the great ease with which a commercial colony like 
Ireland can be kept panting at the heels of British 
and Anglo-Irish interests, with the big railway lobby 
of the House of Commons to see that nothing goes 
wrong. This is not an old, unhappy, far-off thing, 
a hardship of yesterday. It is a living contemporary 
effect of the repression of Ireland, its subordination 
to the owning class in both countries, particularly 
England. The people who pay for it are the native 
colonized Irish. It is a bitter consequence of their 
having been colonized. 

STANDING PAT FOR PAT'S SAKE 

The Irish railway situation gives an excellent clue 
to the large problem of Irish under-production, its 
agricultural and industrial under-development. In 
1906-1910 there was an Irish railways commission, 
appointed by the viceroy. Three of its seven mem- 
bers, one an assistant secretary of the board of 
trade, another general manager of the Lancashire 
and Yorkshire railway, the third a man of means, 
signed a minority report. There are circles, I am 
sure, in which this minority report would be taken as 
the last word of sound business judgment. It en- 
tirely opposes the notion of railways publicly man- 
aged. It declares, with no intention of being funny, 
that "the railway companies have done- what they 
could, in their own interest, and so in the public in- 
terest, to stimulate traffic," begging the whole ques- 
tion of public interest. 

11 If traffic has not expanded as much as it might 
had the conditions been more favorable, the failure 
must, we think, be attributed to a variety of causes, 

[ 165 ] 



of which railway service is only one, and not the 
most important." Those causes are indicated under 
the large head, " the decay of industries." In an 
aside the minority admits that the railways " have 
tended to check the development of Irish manufac- 
tures by facilitating the imports of British goods into 
Ireland," but this of course has nothing to do with 
11 the decay of industries." Emigration, perhaps, 
had a good deal to do with that decay? Very likely; 
but " so far as a congested population have taken 
advantage of improved communications to better 
their condition, the result cannot be regarded, eco- 
nomically speaking, as an unmixed disadvantage." 
The decay of industries is, evidently, as you see, to 
be attributed to one thing alone — the decay of in- 
dustries ! The report then proceeds to compare Ire- 
land to Belgium and to Denmark. It instructs 
Ireland on the importance of increasing its products 
so that the railways may justifiably cut their rates. 
Reducing rates would be " to begin at the wrong 
end. It would be, in effect, to impose a tax upon 
railways receipts in order to put a premium upon 
faulty agricultural methods. If winter dairying 
were established first, we believe that there would be 
such an increase in the volume and regularity of the 
traffic that lower rates would follow as a matter of 
course." 

Then comes that wisdom of the capitalist, which 
is so often sedentary. " How large a field is open 
to Ireland in this single industry [butter] is shown 
by the fact that in 1908 butter to the value of £24,- 
080,912 was imported into the United Kingdom 
from abroad against only £4,026,023 exported from 
Ireland." 

[ 166] 



What Ireland wants from its railways, you ob- 
serve, is adroitly turned round into what the rail- 
ways want from Ireland — "improved methods of 
production, and increased volume of trade." Amal- 
gamation and a new management, " made up largely 
of the most important chief officers of the existing 
railways, and the most prominent directors who are 
commercial men," is the chief reform desirable, re- 
membering always that " no place of any importance 
in Ireland is unprovided with railway communica- 
tion." 

THE OTHER ATTITUDE 

Considering that the best Irish coalfields have no 
railway communication, this last statement of the 
minority report passeth understanding. Much more 
fundamental, however, is its slack conception of the 
deficiencies of Ireland — the sad decay of industry, 
the mad decrease in population, the faults in agri- 
cultural method. These consequences of the past 
merely make the railway experts throw up their 
hands. No " artificial stimulus of reducing rates to 
an uncommercial level," please! Let the Irish rail- 
ways go on paying a select class 4 per cent., as they 
have been doing. That is the " commercial level." 
And then, please, please, " laissez faire." 

The majority report gives a smashing answer to 
this dividend preoccupation of the three English 
commissioners. Four men, three of them Irishmen,* 
signed the majority report. These three were Lord 
Pirrie, a Liberal, the chairman of Harland and 
Wolff, Belfast shipbuilders; Lt.-Col. Poe, a Tory 
landlord; and Thomas Sexton, nationalist ex-M.P., 
of whom Gladstone once said, " the man is little 

[ 167 ] 



short of a master." The fourth was Sir Charles 
Scotter, chairman of the London and South-Western 
Railway. They heard the same 248 national and 
international witnesses, including the premier of 
New Zealand; listened to the same facts and theories 
and watched the same clash of opinion and interest. 
They came out of the inquiry with the kind of con- 
structive policy that makes an honest commission 
seem the most creative of all governmental devices. 
The majority's suggestions for reforming the rail- 
ways have their special value, but the point is how 
clearly they exhibit the acute reality of Irish disad- 
vantage at the present hour. These men never 
stooped to the impolicy and in truth the wickedness 
of dealing with Irish disadvantage in the spirit of 
laissez-faire. There is such a thing as necessary 
reparation in this world, reparation as a preliminary 
to the recovery of function. It is convenient, for ex- 
ample, to define emigration as " taking advantage of 
improved communication to better your condition," 
and it is agreeable to hint that it has been a benefit. 
But that is not the tone of persons who realize the 
duty of reparation. The more practical and imag- 
inative members of this commission did not shirk the 
question of re-making Ireland. They investigated 
in the public interest with broad and sincere concern. 
They had the creative energy to handle the railroad 
problem as something more than a problem of divi- 
dends. 

The decay of industries and the faults of agricul- 
tural method are fully recognized in the majority 
report, but the evil effects of railway policy are never 
evaded. 

What causes have retarded the expansion of traffic 
[ 168 ] 



upon the Irish lines? There have been increases, 
yes, but mainly through the imports of flour and 
bacon, provisions and manufactured goods, " pro- 
duced or producible in the country." " What essen- 
tially constitutes the Irish railway problem," the ma- 
jority agrees, " is the restriction of industry and 
trade in Ireland, by reason of the fact that internal 
and export transit rates are on a higher scale than 
the rates charged for conveyance of commodities 
which compete with Irish products in Irish and Brit- 
ish markets, or with which Irish products might com- 
pete, if conditions were rendered less disadvan- 
tageous to Ireland by lower scales of transit rates." 
No narrow administrative policy can help in a sit- 
uation so radically wrong. " The solution of such a 
problem is as far outside the sphere of amicable 
effort by the Board of Trade, as it is beyond the 
jurisdiction of the Railway and Canal Commission 
Court. The question and the only question as to the 
future of Irish railways, referred to us for an an- 
swer, is this: — 'By what methods can economic, 
efficient, and harmonious working, be best secured? ' 
The answer dictated by the evidence is that such 
working cannot be secured in any sense commen- 
surate with the object set before us, namely, the full 
utilization of the Railways for the development of 
Irish resources except by making them public prop- 
erty, consolidating them into a single system, and 
working that system under representative control for 
the benefit of the country. It follows that, in our 
judgment, fractional or superficial measures would 
leave the essential problem still unsolved, and its 
economic evils, to all practical intents and purposes, 
unabated." 

[ 169 ] 



THE OCTOPUS 

The nigger in the Austen Chamberlain's unionist 
woodpile begins, I think, to exhibit his curly head. 
" The large imports in coal for domestic uses which 
swell the returns of railways traffic, certainly do not 
suggest development of Irish resources," says the 
report, " more especially when it is remembered that 
there are coal fields in the country which are worked 
only to a limited and comparatively unimportant 
extent, and which, under conditions of adequate capi- 
tal, better railway communication, and more favor- 
able rates, might be extensively opened up, to the 
benefit, not only of the mineral districts concerned, 
but of the country as a whole. ... It is difficult to 
understand why the efforts made from time to time 
to secure railway communication have up to the 
present proved ineffective. The Great Southern 
Company declined to construct the branch them- 
selves, or, even if it were constructed by others, to 
work it, without a guarantee against loss, and this 
decision seems to have proven a deterrent to private 
enterprise, which, if encouraged by substantial as- 
sistance from the country, would probably have long 
since surmounted the difficulty." 

The coal of Ireland, " net tonnage available for 
use," was estimated by Professor Hull in 1 88 1 at 
182,280,000 tons. The amount raised per year is 
about 100,000 tons. The important contrast here 
is not between the enormously greater mineral re- 
sources of England and Scotland but between the 
full Irish resources and the meagre Irish production.. 

Against the ironclad competition of England and 
Scotland the main hope of Ireland has been agri- 
[ 170 ] 



cultural, but here the railroads have handicapped 
rather than helped in innumerable small discrimina- 
tory ways. It cost 14s iod per ton to ship bacon 
from Cork to Tipperary, for example, as against 
14s 4d from Liverpool to Tipperary, via Cork, the 
railway route in both cases being the same. It cost 
£5 per ton for salmon from Limerick to London, as 
compared with 27s from Denmark, and £3 10s from 
Norway. " No explanation of these rates appears 
to have been given by the railway companies." But 
Irish industry responds to railway encouragement. 
A Navan factory secured, after a hard struggle, a 
satisfactory rate on Windsor chairs. Its output of 
that article rose from 38J/2 doz. in the second half 
of 1907 to 472 doz. in the second half of 1908. 
The large answer of the railway advocates is this: 
we gain no more dividends by such cooperation, why 
cooperate? Which leads back to the question of 
control. 

But my main object in citing the railway commis. 
sion's report is to dwell on its disclosures of Ire- 
land's emaciated industrial condition. " Transit 
is a heavier item of cost to producers and con- 
sumers " in Ireland than in Scotland and England, 
and this is shockingly important in view of inter- 
national competition. The plain facts of competi- 
tion are these: "The total value of butter, eggs 
and bacon imported into Great Britain from Ire- 
land, in 1908, was £9,375,850, as compared with 
£18,506,283, the value of the same commodities im- 
ported from Denmark, which, moreover, is only one 
out of several countries exporting agricultural prod- 
uce. . . . The estimated value in 1908 of beef, mutton, 
pork, bacon, and hams imported into Great Britain 

[ 171 ] 



from the United States, Argentina, and Denmark 
amounted to about twenty-six millions sterling; while 
the estimated value of the exports of cattle, sheep, 
swine, pork, bacon and hams from Ireland was 
under seventeen millions. In the same year the es- 
timated value of butter, eggs and poultry imported 
into Great Britain from the United States, France, 
Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Sweden, and Russia 
reached a total of twenty-three millions, against 
about seven millions from Ireland." 

What is the responsibility of the railways? 
" The conditions of Ireland are unquestionably fa- 
vorable to a large and permanent increase in the 
volume of its export trade to England; and though 
the slow development of this trade may, to some 
extent, be accounted for in other ways, in our opinion 
it would be greatly stimulated by a reduction of rail- 
way rates, and by increased transit facilities. We 
know that the Continental railways give very low 
rates for traffic exported to Great Britain, especially 
for agricultural products, which are in direct com- 
petition with those of Ireland, and we recognize that 
unless means can be found to place the Irish trade 
on a footing of equality with that of the Continent, 
it is hopeless to look for any substantial development 
of the former." 

That responsibility the majority report had its 
own programme for adjusting, on the principle that 
" the full utilization of Irish railways for the de- 
velopment of resources " would help to " mitigate 
the pressure of poverty, by encouraging rural em- 
ployment, promoting general industries, and expand- 
ing trade." It did not fail, however, to defend its 
suggested use of a state grant. The famous report 
[ 172 ] 



of the financial relations commission of 1896 was 
invoked to clear this claim of the suspicion of pau- 
perism. The report ended with a frank acknowl- 
edgment of Ireland's " unsound economic condition; 
the almost total want of non-agricultural industries; 
and the loss of more than half the population in little 
more than half the century; as well as the high rates 
of Imperial taxation to the very limited resources 
of the people." These are strong words, and they 
apply to the Ireland of this decade. 

THE EXODUS 

" The loss of more than half the population in 
little more than half the century." This, even more 
than faulty agricultural method and decadent indus- 
try, deserves to be seen as a direct and evil conse- 
quence of Irish colonization. 

In a healthy country, emigration is a sign of 
energy. It is either militant and imperial, despatch- 
ing an adventurous tribe, or it is healthily selective, 
compelling " failures " to find in another land the 
adjustment they missed at home. It is the result of 
surplus vitality, an emigration of hope. 

Very different is the emigration of repressed vital- 
ity, the emigration of despair. In the former case, 
men adventure. In the latter, men escape. The 
former is a sowing of seed, the latter a transplanta- 
tion. The former is preponderantly masculine. 
The latter takes away a high proportion of mar- 
riageable girls and women. It is the retreat, not 
the advance, of a nation. It is the search for an 
adjustment in a new land which should normally be 
offered at home. It is the surest sign of a misman- 
aged state. 

[ 173 ] 



Nothing is more human than the habit of evasion. 
Once a people learn to skirt a difficulty instead of 
facing it, every freshet deepens the new channel, and 
vitality is diverged. The old stream-bed remains, 
but its course is sluggish, and its aeration slow. 
Normal obstacles then become abnormal. And, at 
the very first hint of difficulty, the new channel swells 
so long as its discharge is ensured. The nation has 
put the force of its life into an altered destiny. 

The exodus from Ireland is the chief act in its 
modern history. It began in desperation. The 
steamship made the conduit broader and more invit- 
ing, and it continued by the force of circumstance 
and habit. After seventy years, it is no longer tor- 
rential. The flood has dwindled to a trickling 
stream. But the stream has never ceased. 

When Irishmen had to choose between extermi- 
nation and rebellion, they brooded on saving Ire- 
land by force. When emigration gave them a new 
option, they said " God save Ireland," and saved 
themselves. The cheap steerage rates did more for 
imperial conquest than centuries of rule imposed. 
Those who left Ireland carried with them a hatred 
of England. The land war was capitalized by the 
Irish emigrant. The agrarian Wild Geese won the 
agrarian Fontenoy. But it was to build up Amer- 
ica, not Ireland, that the energy of seventy years 
was devoted. This energy was subtracted from the 
evolution of Ireland as a nation. To measure the 
loss, however, one must decide whether it could have 
overthrown the forces that turned it abroad. 

At first emigration was a merciful deliverance. 
In a poor country like Ireland government was the 
arbiter of life. Government was so perverted as to 

[ i74] 



skim the cream from every Irish activity, and less 
separated milk was left to go round than could pos- 
sibly keep the people from starving. No policy of 
self-help could have redeemed the rack-rented ten- 
ants of feudal Ireland. Government not only failed 
to do everything in its power to prepare the common 
Irish by education or subsistence for decent citizen- 
ship, but it actually favored the exploitation of 
decent citizenship in a number of base and insensate 
ways. Had the people once been educated and 
equipped for the struggle of life, it is possible they 
might have been able to survive the handicap of 
bad government. But it is one thing to impose dif- 
ficulties on a mature and well-nurtured man, it is 
another thing to inflict them on immaturity. The 
common Irish were at that level of civilization where 
ascent requires a pull from above; and the govern- 
ment put its ladders out of their reach. They had 
not even the power to climb by a human ladder, for 
their status was the status of brutes, and their will 
as little desired. Badly as the Negroes are being 
degraded in the United States today, little as the 
United States government has done to bring the 
Negro to the ladder and the ladder to the Negro, 
the condition of the common Irish up to 1870 was 
incalculably worse. Subject to the will of the over- 
lord in all departments of life, they were inured to 
subjection, and they lived from hand to mouth. 
And when at last the overlord was paid off and sub- 
jection modified, they were too intimidated to climb. 
When your knuckles have been smashed every time 
you clamber up the wall, you end by refusing to 
clamber. And if, at the other side, a gap is broken, 
you rush for the gap without reflecting. Emigra- 

C 175] 



tion gave the Irishmen an exit long before the over- 
lord left the wall. 

THE PENALTY 

Emigration notified England day after day, week 
after week, month after month, year after year, that 
the state of Ireland was rotten, and that the com- 
mon Irish were making this tragic declaration of 
democratic bankruptcy. English statesmen knew 
that Ireland was losing, not its superabundance, but 
its lifeblood. They knew, from the tally of their 
own police at the docks and the profits of their own 
steamship companies and their own paid Colonial 
advertisements of free land and assisted passages, 
that emigration was weeding out the fit, and leaving 
the unfit to mate and breed and decay. They knew 
that poverty is tragedy and insanity is tragedy and 
blindness is tragedy. They knew that ignorance is 
tragedy, and a life without enlightenment the breed- 
ing-bed of mental and moral and physical pestilence. 
But it took Ireland forty years of this bleeding gash 
of emigration before it got its day in court, and in 
that time the wound had drained the country grey. 
The time came, during this emigration, when the 
difficulties of life in Ireland were minimized, and the 
government no longer quite inaccessible. But by 
that time a habit had been formed of the gravest 
kind, and the spirit of the nation impaired. The 
extent of Irish emigration is almost beyond belief. 
No such proportionate exodus has taken place from 
any other country in modern times. With uncalcu- 
lating eagerness the Irish thronged from the land 
of dispossession to the hazy promise of the United 
States. In other countries this process was later 
[ 176 ] 



renewed. Before the war emigration was increas- 
ing immeasurably among the Italians, the Slavs and 
the mixed populations of Europe's South East. No 
one can say what migration will mean in the next 
decade. Other countries may yield to despair and 
reproduce the depopulation of Ireland. As facts 
are today, however, the transplantation of the Irish 
race is an absolutely unique fact in modern history. 
When they left, they were not, it is true, succeeded 
by aliens. They vacated to graziers and to bul- 
locks. But their leaving was permanent. Dead 
stumps, not saplings, took their place. 

The roll-call of Ireland's early exodus is now 
being told in foreign lands. Out of every hundred 
Irish funerals between 1900 and 19 10, forty took 
place in the United States. That means that over 
500,000 Irish were buried outside their native land 
in those ten years. Out of 5,810,000 living native- 
born Irish enumerated in Ireland and the United 
States in 19 10, 1,351,400, or nearly a quarter, were 
permanent residents of the United States. 

THE CONSEQUENCES 

Meanwhile, Ireland begins to inherit the legacies 
of emigration. She had sent away sane people, she 
kept mad people. She had sent away sober people, 
she kept drunken people. She had sent away people 
with good eyes, she treasured the blind. She had 
despatched people who wanted to get on in the 
world, she retained the burdensome, the quiescent 
and the weak. And then, with her most marriage- 
able men and women overseas, she turned feebly to 
reproduction, and of the small number that she re- 
produced — small because her marriages were 

[ 177 ] 



fewer and later — an increasing percentage were 
degenerate. 

The patriot is usually a hot person who makes a 
virtue of being impervious to disagreeable facts. 
When confronted with contemporary emigration, he 
finds balm in recent returns that show the losses are 
now " normal." Like a regiment in barracks, the 
country has a civil, as against a warlike death-rate. 
But those who survey Ireland critically cannot close 
the subject so cheerfully. The campaign is over, 
but we inherit the effects of the campaign. Some of 
the emigrants undoubtedly left because Ireland re- 
jected them, but the vast majority left because they, 
willingly or unwillingly, rejected Ireland. It is a 
commonplace that they were " the flower of the 
land." At any rate, 85% of them were between 15 
and 45, and half of them women of the marriageable 
age. 

If 100 people live together of whom one is blind, 
and one a cripple and one a drunkard and two insane, 
and five hopelessly invalid, the defectives are 10%. 
But if 10 of the able-bodied ninety go away, it is 
obvious that the percentage of the defectives become 
12.5. If that operation is repeated, it is clear that 
the defectives, without increasing in number, increase 
in proportion to 14.3. The little group has not 
necessarily degenerated. But the degenerates loom 
larger, and become a heavier tax on the people who 
remain. Where the 90 supported 10, you find 70 
charged with 10, an increased obligation of over 
3% apiece. Those who go away may contribute 
money, but the money can scarcely compensate for 
the extra burden on the shrunken community. 

Something like this has taken place in Ireland. 
[ 178 ] 



The process is the same as the weeding-out process 
in dairy farming, only it is the producers that have 
been shipped, and the small-milkers retained. Out 
of the 4,390,000 people in Ireland in 191 1, there 
were several hundreds of thousands who were obvi- 
ously deemed unfit to emigrate. When this process 
is accounted for, it is easy to understand why Ireland 
is pre-eminent in the United Kingdom for physical 
degeneracy. But unfortunately there is such a thing 
as absolute, as well as relative, pre-eminence. 
When you retain small-milkers on a dairy-farm, and 
when you breed from them repeatedly, you event- 
ually achieve a cow that is almost a prohibitionist. 
In other words, you get what you bargained for with 
poor, complying Nature. The same fact is true of 
human beings. In your group of 80 persons, the 10 
degenerates either breed together, or they mate and 
reproduce with the 70. In that way you give hered- 
ity whatever vitiating power it has, and to judge 
from certain isolated townlands in Ireland, its power 
to vitiate is terrific. 

To come to particulars, here are the figures as to 
lunatics, known and labelled lunatics, in the United 
Kingdom : 

P , , Per Per Per 

England 
y , 100,000 Scot- 100,000 Ire- 100,000 

rp- , Inhabi- land Inhabi- land Inhabi- 
tants tants tants 

1871 56,755 249 7,729 230 10,257 189 

1881 73,113 281 10,012 273 13,062 253 

1891 86,795 299 12,595 3 12 I 6,25i 344 

1901 107,944 332 15,899 355 21,169 474 

1911 I33, x 57 369 18,636 391 24,394 557 

In regard to total blindness, the same pre- 
[ 179 ] 



s 



Wales 


Scotland 


Ireland 


40,083 


94,319 


205,317 


41,893 


96,239 


203,036 


42,47+ 


97,294 


202,202 


42,537 


96,895 


198,938 



eminence was to be noted before the war. Per 
100,000 inhabitants in 1900: 

England and Wales 77.8 

Scotland 72.7 

Ireland 954 

The total for Ireland is 4,263 persons. 
In regard to old age pensions, the figures are even 
more striking. 

Year England 

1912 602,441 

1913 626,753 

1914 642,161 

1915 648,868 

Here you find that proportionately Ireland is 
called upon to support twice as many helpless aged 
poor as the other countries in the United Kingdom. 
This points to two facts. The first is the unnatural 
proportion of hopeless economic servitude in Ire- 
land. The second is the unnatural proportion of 
aged people to the rest of the population. Super- 
ficially, it looks as if the British government were 
being twice as benign to Ireland as to England or 
Scotland. Actually, it means that in its accumula- 
tion of poor people who, after a lifetime of toil, can- 
not pull their own weight, Ireland is twice as badly 
off. Does this mean that the Irish are naturally 
paupers? Compare Ireland and Scotland. 

Year Scotland Ireland 

Paupers 
1900 65,929 

1905 73,363 

1910 75,626 

1915 67,632 

282,550 



Dependents 


Indoor 


Outdoor 


34,oo3 


43,820 


58,534 


37,297 


43,9" 


57,909 


4o,955 


41,866 


55,496 


33,194 


38,072 


38,072 


145,449 


167,669 


2IO,OII 


[ 180] 







THE INCURSION OF THE DANES 

We now come to faulty agricultural method, the 
most serious economic handicap in Ireland. From 
the man who keeps a goat in the secret belief that 
it prevents disease among his cows to the man who 
scorns any kind of written records, there is every 
known variety of ignorance in Irish dairying, and 
what is true of dairying is true of raising pigs and 
sheep and is also true of tillage. The work of Sir 
Horace Plunkett and the Irish Agricultural Organ- 
ization Society has been so fruitful as to be beyond 
challenge. In an island of criticis, no critic has un- 
dermined this greatest triumph of Sinn Fein. But 
despite the I. A. O. S. the commonplaces of modern 
agriculture are unlearned and unsuspected in a great 
part of contemporary Ireland, and the observers who 
have gone from Ireland to Denmark have usually 
reported the sensation of progressing fifty years by 
travelling two days. The facts are simple. Danish 
farming has long since passed out of the stage where 
the routine is traditional and archaic and the best 
rule a rule of thumb. Danish farming has accepted 
and adapted the technology of the machine. It has 
become a modern machine industry. The economies 
of cooperation are understood and applied by a vast 
majority of the farmers. The problems of transit 
and delivery are handled as in few other machine in- 
dustries, so that Danish butter can be marketed even 
in Ireland in normal times, not to mention such items 
as £25,000 worth of Danish butter sold in Belfast 
every year in the winter months. " The land in Jut- 
land is very poor — bog land — but the farmers 
seem to be making the most of their land," testifies 

[ 181 ] 



a British veterinarian, " For it is very interesting to 
notice the cattle on the land. They are tethered, 
and as they eat up the grass they are passed a little 
further along on to fresh grass, and so on until they 
get the whole field mown down and they can proceed 
again." This intensive grazing is a symbol of the 
mechanical principle in Danish farming. " Effi- 
ciency," implying the use of the best means toward 
producing for profit, is a hackneyed word, but it is 
the only word that describes the rigid principle by 
which the Danes have succeeded. 

BUTTER 

No such degree of "efficiency " is to be found in 
Ireland. We have seen the figures of Irish agri- 
cultural export compared with Danish agricultural 
export, and the discrepancy is monstrous. It is not 
in the state of Denmark that something is now shown 
to be rotten. The minority report of the Irish rail- 
way commissioners minimized the question of high 
rates but it quite fairly indicated the backwardness 
of agriculture, and its insistence on faulty methods 
has its healthy astringency. The problem of winter 
dairying alone has turned the hair of many agricul- 
tural reformers white, so stubborn and immovable 
are the Irish farmers. Trying to make the farmers 
" efficient " is like trying to curl limp hair. Even Sir 
Horace Plunkett has talked sadly of their defective 
characters and fallen back on the psychological for- 
mulas of the sewing circle and the bible class. 

Let us contemplate butter. The Irish milk com- 
mission of 191 1 was another of those excellent com- 
missions appointed by Lord Aberdeen to trace facts 
to their lairs among the people, and to capture those 
[ 182 ] 



facts for the administrators' zoological garden. 
Diverging from milk to butter the report of the com- 
mission went into agricultural history to this effect, 
" Fundamentally the change that has taken place in 
the butter making industry in Ireland has been the 
conversion of what used practically to be a retail 
trade into a wholesale trade. The old method, uni- 
versal up to 1880, was that each farmer made but- 
ter at home, gradually filling his firkins with layers 
of butter produced under all sorts of different condi- 
tions and continually varying in texture and flavour. 
These firkins he sold in the nearest market, direct to 
local customers, or to middlemen who sometimes 
attempted to obtain an approximately average qual- 
ity by blending the contents of a number of firkins 
together and sometimes merely exported the butter 
without even this attempt to remove the chief com- 
mercial objection to butter made this way, i. e., com- 
plete lack of uniformity in flavour, colour, texture 
or package. Each dairy-farmer under this system 
was in very much the same commercial situation as, 
for instance, a hand-loom weaver; and in the old 
days the Irish butter trade was a very great national 
asset, just as the hand-woven linens and woollens 
were. 

" From 1880 foreign competition began, first 
from Denmark then from other countries, not only 
in the British, but actually in the Irish market. The 
prices obtainable for Irish butter produced under the 
old conditions were so unprofitable that a large num- 
ber of dairy-farmers went out of the business alto- 
gether and resorted to dry stock. The trade ap- 
peared to be doomed to destruction. There was 
only one way to meet the competition from abroad 

[ 183 ] 



and that was to adopt the methods of our competi- 
tors, install the latest modern machinery, and put 
upon the market butter of a higher and more uniform 
quality. Hence the introduction of the creamery 
system. At first, most of the creameries started 
were proprietory concerns, i. e., profits earned by the 
creamery belonged to the individual or company who 
owned it. But by a fortunate coincidence, the co- 
operative movement was founded in time to deal 
with the new situation, and the vast majority of 
creameries in Ireland are now owned by the dairy- 
farmers themselves, who retain all the profits earned 
in their business. In this way the Irish butter trade 
was saved, and the dairy industry was retained in 
Ireland." 

THE REAL DETERRENT 

So far, so good. With no extraordinary help 
from the government, with economic leadership from 
Sir Horace Plunkett, the dairy-farmers managed in 
time (with some unfortunate consequences to the 
poor local baby) to keep pace with the modern ma- 
chine. But why do they not take the next step and 
adopt winter dairying? " It is not too much to say 
that the national health and the national prosperity 
would be immensely improved in consequence." 
There are two sides to it, of course. " At present 
the farmer declares that winter dairying cannot be 
made to pay; that owing to the price of feeding stuffs 
and the scarcity of labour, the receipts from butter- 
making or the price paid by creameries is unremuner- 
ative; that people are unwilling to pay a remunera- 
tive price for retail milk, and that there is less profit 
on winter milk at 3d a quart than on summer milk 
[ 184] 



at 2d a quart. The chief deterrents, however, seem 
to be the alleged difficulty of obtaining suitable la- 
bour, and a belief, based rather on tradition than on 
actual experience of suitable modern methods, that 
winter dairying cannot be made to pay." 

There is a significance in this traditionality of the 
farmers that goes beyond winter dairying and the 
butter industry. Whatever was accomplished in the 
way of cooperation, the thick crust of custom re- 
mains unbroken, and will remain unbroken, barring 
a volcanic eruption in Ireland, until the root of the 
matter is seized by the statesmanship of the country. 

The root, of course, is purposeful education. 
The railways may exploit Ireland and emigration 
may weaken it, but to deprive it of proper training 
for its vocations is to deprive it of the one remedial 
principle, the qualitative element which corrects 
quantitative loss. The uneducated citizen is so 
handicapped in the modern community that he is 
confined to simple labor, the product of primitive 
untutored effort. Compound labor is the opportu- 
nity opened to the educated citizen. By training he 
is enabled to manipulate more than his personal re- 
sources, he is enabled to coordinate, to economize, 
to simplify. To deprive a citizen of education is to 
deprive a community of technology. It is to keep it 
backward, feeble, subservient. It is to send it bare- 
handed against industry's machine guns. 

UNEDUCATED 

This is the condition of the Irish people. The at- 
titude of the farmers toward winter dairying is not 
a national attitude, it is a typical uneducated attitude. 
The Servians would take the same attitude in the 

[ 185 ]. 



same circumstances. So would the farmers of Al- 
bania. In homogeneous countries like Denmark 
there was no privileged class to use the peasants like 
cattle, totally disregarding their capabilities. The 
people of Denmark had no absentee landlords, no 
bored and contemptuous House of Lords. It was a 
commonwealth in which the importance of education 
was magnificently realized and universally applied. 
The will of the whole people, it is true, promoted 
this development. The people were not a mere 
anvil to the government's hammer. But the essen- 
tial lesson of Denmark is the national education back 
of its farming. No such farming is conceivable 
without such a system of education. The butter ef- 
ficiency of Denmark is no more the product of Dan- 
ish will-power churning superhumanly than the danc- 
ing of a trained Russian ballet is the product of a 
happy knack of dancing. There are those who de- 
cline to consider the mundane processes of character. 
They believe that results are achieved by being full 
of virtue, that self-perfection is purely a matter of 
taking thought. Such people can never be convinced 
that there is a great deal in character that is in no 
sense " innate "; that the least said about innateness, 
the soonest mended; that the thing to do with 
naughtiness is usually to give a worm-powder; that 
the government which sees poverty and uneducation 
in a community had better organize education before 
discussing national traits. There are limits even to 
education, as witness the supposed commercial in- 
adaptability of the American Indian. But those 
limits are only to be accepted after fair and ex- 
haustive trial. To proclaim them beforehand is to 
greet the devil with suspicious cordiality. 
[ 186] 



" There is £35,000,000 worth of imported goods 
that should be produced in Ireland," said Mr. T. P. 
Gill, secretary of the department of agriculture, tes- 
tifying before the finance commission of 191 1, "in- 
cluding a large proportion of agricultural produce, 
such as feeding-stuffs, and industries of a kind that 
are more or less related to agriculture." 

Said Mr. Plender to Mr. Gill, with the usual 
aplomb of the Englishman, " I suppose it is due to 
some extent to physical indolence on the part of the 
people, is it not? " 

" I do not think it could be put in that way," Mr. 
Gill answered. " The people no doubt, to a very 
great extent, have lost what they once had to a 
greater extent — an industrial spirit. Many causes 
have contributed to that — very largely amongst 
those causes has been the bad management of the 
country on the part of government." 

The national ghost seemed about to walk, but Mr. 
Plender appeased him. " I asked that question 
merely because you stated that there was nothing 
to prevent the butter industry being maintained 
throughout the year, but that it was dropped during 
the winter, and there was evidently a lack of enter- 
prise which led to foreign competitors getting the ad- 
vantage of Ireland in the markets. The conclusion 
I formed from that lack of effort during the winter 
was that probably the people engaged in that employ- 
ment were less industrious than the people in other 



countries." 



The explanation of inherent vice did not recom- 
mend itself to Mr. Gill. " That is not so," he ex- 
plained. " The making of butter in the winter is 
a modern thing. The whole system everywhere had 

[ 187 ] 



been to have butter made during the summer months 
of the year, and then for the supply to go short in 
the winter. The other countries, like Denmark and 
France, have in their recent progressive development 
begun to make butter all the year round; but that is 
an improvement which they have introduced into 
their agriculture only in recent times. We have 
not yet introduced that improvement into Ireland, 
but it is one of the thing we are endeavoring to do. 
The fact that butter is not made in the winter is not 
due to laziness on the part of the people, but is due 
to lack of knowledge, to a long-depressed agricul- 
tural spirit, and to backwardness in industrial devel- 
opment. That is one of the things we have to cor- 
rect, and it is being steadily corrected " 

THE SHYNESS OF CAPITAL 

" If Ireland had the capital " — that is a constant 
refrain in this connection. Capital is on the side 
of the big battalions. In recent years a considerable 
number of the Irish bourgeoisie — prospering farm- 
ers and traders — have begun to invest in Irish rail- 
ways and industrial securities, but the entrenched 
wealth of Ireland is anti-national and unionist. 
" There never was a Liberal on the board of the 
Bank of Ireland in my time," the Right Hon. Law- 
rence Waldron of the Dublin Stock Exchange told 
the finance commission. 

The Unionists, as Mr. Waldron made clear, " had 
all the land and there was no other property in Ire- 
land, because these banks and other concerns grad- 
ually arose out of the improvement of the land. 
They found themselves from historical causes in 
[ 188 ] 



possession of wealth and power, and like everybody 
else, they tried to retain it." 

" They clung to it, naturally," the Catholic bishop 
of Ross soliloquized. 

" And small blame to them," confessed the stock- 
holder. 

The stockholder's attitude toward privileged 
wealth in Ireland did not keep him from defining its 
habit and its habitat. 

" Historically," the resolute Nationalist bishop 
asked him, " that class has come to consider the gov- 
ernment of Ireland as their own peculiar perqui- 
site?" 

" I quite agree," answered Mr. Waldron. 

" And the offices in the country," persisted the 
bishop, " and the posts in the High Courts of Justice, 
were all staffed with men of that particular class? " 

" I quite agree," answered Mr. Waldron, a little 
uncomfortably. 

" All the government offices in Dublin and all over 
the country? " the bishop concluded. 

" Although I agree," Mr. Waldron at last remon- 
strated, " I think it is only fair to say in answer to 
that, that they came from a class which for years 
had the government of England in their hands. It 
must be admitted by a Nationalist and Catholic like 
myself that the Protestants were better educated; 
and really, this question roughly divides into Catho- 
lics and Protestants, under whatever specious dis- 
guise it may be presented. But I think Protestants 
have been slow to notice the change of conditions; 
like all other classes in possession of power, they 
have clung to it, as, speaking for myself and those 

[ 189 ] 



who share my views, I am perfectly certain we 
should ourselves have done in similar circumstances." 

Did Mr. Waldron mean the Catholic hierarchy 
when he spoke of " other classes in possession of 
power " ? Education, at any rate, is a form of capi- 
tal that Mr. Waldron agreed with Mr. Gill about; 
and he left no doubt that education still gave the 
Unionist the huge preponderance of power. " The 
management of the great commercial concerns is 
nearly all in the hands of Unionists, and so is a great 
proportion of the capital of all the great enterprises 
of Ireland, the great railways and the banks, other 
than certain national banks — the National, the 
Munster and Leinster, and the Hibernian Banks, 
which have a majority of the popular party I would 
say; but it is as I say with regard to all the great 
railways and the Bank of Ireland, which is the most 
important financial institution in Ireland." 

It is unnecessary to press this point further. Cap- 
ital is nervous and sensitive. Capital is Unionist. 
" There exists an old distrust of Ireland," wrote a 
shrewd Frenchman, Leonce de Lavergne, in 1855, 
" not soon to be eradicated. . . . [The English] 
fear the revival of jacqueries, and detest popery and 
the papists. Ask an Englishman to invest his capital 
in Ireland, promising him at the same time a return 
of eight or ten per cent, and it is much the same as 
proposing to a Frenchman to send him to Africa 
among the Arabs." This is not the least part of 
Ireland's economic legacy, the legacy of husks. 
Burying the past would be simpler, if the tepidity of 
capital were not so full of consequences, and if Ire- 
land were not still so full of hideous object lessons. 

[ 190 ] 



THE HUMAN REFUSE HEAP 

The city of Dublin provides one hideous economic 
object-lesson. With a population of 300,000, it 
offers so little opportunity to enterprise that the vast 
number of Dublin men cannot be included in such 
small manufactures as brewing, distilling, the mak- 
ing of soda water or biscuits. The consequence has 
been to convert this city of hapless industry into a 
viscid pool of unskilled workers, casual workers and 
non-workers. Hawkers, laborers, porters, paupers 
and their families numbered 103,081 in 191 1, with a 
great many unemployed and unemployable included 
in this huge class. Coachmen, carpenters and van- 
men numbered 15,380. With skilled workers' 
wages only 79% of London wages and food 107% 
the price of London food (excepting meat) , the con- 
dition of the unskilled may be easily inferred. 

The best way to imagine it is to picture the housing 
conditions of Dublin. It is an old city, a fatal mag- 
net to the rural districts. Unfortunate country- 
people still crowd up to it. Finding the poorest kind 
of casual labor, they swell the unemployed and the 
unemployable, coagulating in foul and unsuitable 
tenements such as disgrace no other city in the 
British Isles. In " houses unfit for human habita- 
tion and incapable of being rendered fit for human 
habitation" there were, in 1913, 22,701 persons. 
In " houses which are so decayed or so badly con- 
structed as to be on or fast approaching the border- 
line of being unfit for human habitation," there were 
37,552 persons. And in structurally sound tene- 
ments there were 27,052 persons. The 22,701 per- 
sons first mentioned were crowded into 15 18 danger- 

C 191 ] 



ous structures, anywhere up to 12 persons in one 
room, and in all Dublin 20,000 families out of 25,- 
000 families in tenements having no more than one 
room. 



12,296 1 

n,335 1 

8,928 1 

5,978 1 

3,448 1 

3,014 1 

450 1 

176 1 

60 1 



ving four in a room, 
ving five in a room, 
ving six in a room, 
ving seven in a room, 
ving eight in a room, 
ving nine in a room, 
ving ten in a room, 
ving eleven in a room, 
ving twelve in a room. 



Where 6 families out of every thousand families 
in modern Belfast live in a single room, 339 families 
live this way in Dublin; and often the entire family 
sleeps in a single " bed." " Generally the only 
water-supply of the house," says the government re- 
port of 1914, "is furnished by a single water tap 
which is in the yard. . . . The closet accommoda- 
tion is common, as the evidence shows, not only to 
the occupants of the house, but to anyone who likes 
to come in off the street, and is, of course, common 
to both sexes. Having visited a large number of 
these houses in all parts of the city, we have no hesi- 
tation in saying that it is no uncommon thing to find 
halls and landings, yards and closets of the houses in 
a filthy condition, and in nearly every case human 
excreta is to be found scattered about the yards and 
on the floors of the closets and in some cases even 
in the passages of the house itself. At the same 
time it is gratifying to find in a number of instances 
that in spite of the many drawbacks, an effort is made 
by the occupants to keep their rooms tidy and the 

[ 192 ] 



walls are often decorated with pictures and when 
making one of our inspections after Christmas we 
frequently noticed an attempt to decorate for the 
season of the year. . . . Having regard to the 
above conditions, we are prepared to accept Sir 
Charles Cameron's evidence, that the female inhabi- 
tants of the tenement houses seldom use the closets; 
indeed it would be hard to believe otherwise, as we 
cannot conceive how any self-respecting male or fe- 
male could be expected to use accommodations such 
as we have seen." 

The rental of the tenement houses amounts to 
£191,509 10. o. Two-thirds of the families live on 
£1 a week or less — 4,000 earning not more than 
fifteen shillings. 

In 191 1 over 44% of the deaths among these 
people occurred in workhouses, hospitals, asylums 
and prisons. The death-rate among children of the 
well-to-do class in Dublin was .9. Among laborers' 
children, it was 12.7, fourteen times as great. 

A number of these Dublin workers took part in 
the insurrection of 19 16, well-drilled and desperate 
men under the leadership of James Connolly. 
They had no illusion whatever that the nauseating 
condition of Dublin was a fact of the " dim past." 
They knew that babies in the slums of Dublin had 
not half the chance of cattle. They knew that in- 
cest and prostitution and syphilis accompanied that 
Dublin slum-life, a life of indecencies so unmention- 
able that no one can fully quote the government re- 
ports. But when labor joined in the insurrection 
of 19 1 6, Dublin capital represented by W. M. 
Murphy joined heartily in calling for " justice," 
which did not mean decency for Dublin but merely 

[ i93 ] 



James Connolly's blood. Dublin capital did not call 
in vain. In the fighting of Easter Week, James 
Connolly received a shattering leg-wound. He was 
condemned by a military tribunal for rising against 
the government of Ireland, and as soon as he was 
able to be removed from the hospital to the barrack 
yard he was supported to a chair and shot. 



[ i94 ] 



VII 
THE POLITICAL LEGACY 

THE LAST FIFTY YEARS 

TOR fifty years," declared Ernest Barker in 
19 1 7, "both of our parties — each in its different 
way, and each according to its different lights — have 
sought to do justice to the grievances of Ireland; 
and here these hatreds of the buried past lift their 
menacing front and join their hands with the hatred 
of Germany." 

Mr. Barker is a fellow of New College, Oxford, 
and his conviction is that of a cultivated liberal. He 
knows Ireland's unhappy history, but he is certain 
that since 1867 England has met Ireland in a new 
spirit. He proclaims the advent of self-government 
for Irishmen. He believes that self-government 
even above good government is the ideal of the 
British empire, and he welcomes Ireland on the 
threshold of the commonwealth, the true empire: 
" It is, to all whose eyes are not obscured by pas- 
sion, a living home of divine freedom, in which the 
ends of the earth are knit together not for profit, 
and not for power, but in the name and the hope of 
self-government. Ireland has waited long — too 
long, indeed: and yet the difficulties (difficulties, 
many of them, within her own borders) have been 
many — for the day of the entering into the free- 
dom of our common home. But the day of entering 

[ i95 ] 



is at hand: dawn stands poised on the horizon; and 
if there are still some clouds in the sky, there is also 
light, and the promise of light." 

In this utterance Mr. Barker shows goodwill and 
fine feeling. I believe the effect of it on most im- 
partial outsiders would be to persuade them that he 
is not only detached and disinterested but right. He 
is simple where Irishmen are often turgid. He is 
self-possessed where they are gusty. He is kind 
where their vindictiveness is too usual. Unless your 
prepossessions are already different, Mr. Barker's 
tone (even when he speaks of Germany and starts 
unreasoning processes) must seem admirable, and I 
am sure that the pamphlet from which I quote, Ire- 
land in the Last Fifty Years (1866-1916), steadied 
many questioning souls. 

But suppose for a moment that it strikes an Irish- 
man somewhat as the tone of open-shop employers 
strikes labor. " For fifty years we have sought to 
do justice to the grievances " of labor and so on. 
Every one is not bewildered, in that case, when labor 
brutally laughs. 

Why does an Irishman laugh at such sincere claims 
as these? Mr. Barker is honest, he is instructed, he 
is liberal. Where is he at fault? I hope it will 
not be thought picayune if, before I refer to his main 
contention, I point out an initial Britticism, his idea 
of Irish grievances. I must confess I dislike the 
word grievances. Into it there is compressed a 
whole class attitude, an attitude of superiority. 
There is something of the nursery and something of 
the servants' hall about this feudal word, which is 
steeped in the atmosphere of complaint. When a 
man seeks justice in court he is undoubtedly called 

[ 196 ] 



either a complainant or plaintiff, both words preserv- 
ing the wails and whimpers of the subject classes, but 
this terminology is a wrong terminology. What the 
Irish have addressed to England are accusations and 
charges, not grievances. They have spoken to Eng- 
land from the vantage point of their outraged 
rights. If might is right, grievance is the proper 
word to apply to Ireland's demand, but not other- 
wise. The word grievance has the notion of supe- 
rior force latent in it. It is addressed from below, 
up. One does not speak of England's grievances 
against Andorra. And where rights are genuinely 
accepted the word is inapplicable. One scarcely says 
that the Jews gave Christ a grievance. 

But there is more in Mr. Barker's tone than this 
quite unconscious adoption of a self-righteous word. 
There is his very assertion that the English parties 
have sought to do justice. This kind of argument 
is double-edged. What we must deal with, surely, 
is what England has done, not with what she sought 
to do. The intentions of modern political parties 
are almost impossible to estimate. If we are to 
believe Gladstone, England was practically the enemy 
of mankind under the leadership of Disraeli; and 
heaven knows what the Tories thought of England 
when they themselves were out of power. It is sim- 
pler in these matters to refrain from making sweep- 
ing claims that cannot possibly be substantiated, and 
to be candid about ascertained facts. If all the facts 
showed a steady good intention on the part of Eng- 
land, Mr. Barker should certainly claim it; but the 
object of such a claim is to foreclose the whole Irish 
question. It is to show that justice is obtainable 
under the existing arrangement, that it is unreason- 

L i97 ] 



able of Irishmen to press their will, childish of them 
to be " lurid," wicked of them to criticize England 
when England is at war. In asserting England's 
justice, Mr. Barker stands a chance of rallying opin- 
ion against the rebellious Irishman, but only if Irish 
testimony is not interposed to counter his claim, to 
say what is " lurid " and what is not " lurid," to 
remind the reader of the actual conditions under 
which England has amended the state of Ireland. 

JUSTICE UNDER DURESS 

The main issue first. Did the home rule move- 
ment spring from the desires of either or both Eng- 
lish parties to do justice? Mr. Barker has for- 
gotten that home rule was introduced into English 
politics by the nasty method of forcible feeding, with 
Gladstone brave enough to take it easily but a large 
section of the Liberal party declaring and winning 
a hunger strike. Isaac Butt, the temporizing leader 
of Irish progressivism, meekly offered the issue 
of home rule to England. It was trampled under- 
foot. Then Parnell arrived, straight slim figure 
outlined against the chiaroscuro of famine and rebel- 
lion, dynamite, assassination, coercion. What did 
Parnell meet from Mr. Barker's famous parties? 

" Few chapters of our history," says Lord Morley 
in his Recollections, " do us so little honour as the 
quarrel between England and Ireland in the five 
years from 1880." In 1885 the Tories saw a back- 
door opening away from justice. There was great 
hope among them that Irish tribalism would save 
them in 1885, that "the extension of the country 
franchise would not be unfavorable to the landlord 
interest." In his life of Gladstone Lord Morley 
[ 198 ] 



tells us to what extent the " deep conservatism of the 
peasantry " was revealed. In Cork the Tories 
polled 300 votes against nearly 10,000 for the Na- 
tionalists. In Mayo the Tories polled 200 against 
nearly 10,000 for the Nationalists. In Kildare, a 
landlord county, the Tory got 467 against 3169. In 
Kerry the Tory had 30 against 3,000. And in the 
House of Commons Parnell commanded that famil- 
iar British weapon, the balance of power. " Hence- 
forth," Mr. Barker rather naively admits, " the Eng- 
lish party system was always profoundly disturbed 
at all times when neither of the two great parties 
had a majority independent of the Irish vote. This 
disturbance had been evident in 1885, when the union 
of the Irish with the Conservative vote had over- 
thrown Gladstone: it is still more evident in 1886, 
when the union of the Irish with the Liberal vote 
overthrew Salisbury, and installed Gladstone once 
more in power for a few brief months. But the 
ways of an English party which depends on the 
Irish vote are generally hard; and Gladstone, aban- 
doned by many of his old supporters, failed to carry 
the home rule bill of 1886 even in the House of 
Commons." 

Granting that Ireland's criterion of justice — 
home rule — is not necessarily Mr. Barker's, does 
this process seem like the process of sympathy? 
Everyone knows what brought the disestablishment 
of the Irish church into " the region of practical 
politics " — Parnell gave the whole credit to a Fenian 
dynamite outrage, and Gladstone never disguised 
that outrage had stimulated England into action. 
Everyone knows what Parnell's obstructionism ac- 
complished. To ignore these things, to paint Eng- 

[ 199 J 



land as " seeking " to do justice since 1867, is to mis- 
read history. You might as well say in 1930 that 
the enfranchisement of women in 19 17 proved that 
both parties had sought from 1890 to do justice to 
the grievances of the suffragettes. And there are 
liberal Englishmen who will certainly say it, when 
another " dawn stands poised on the horizon." 

AMELIORATION 

When you sponge away this sentimentality, there 
is more in recent legislation for Ireland than a series 
of galvanic responses to the shock of agitation. 
Many measures, indeed, were conciliatory in the Bis- 
marckian sense. They were intended to kill home 
rule by kindness. Even so, there was a magnificent 
change from the totally indifferent or else hostile 
attitude which preceded the extension of the fran- 
chise. But before analyzing this amelioration one 
must explain in fairness to Mr. Barker that his atti- 
tude toward Ireland is largely legalistic. His is 
good stubborn pride of race. He disagrees with 
Burke that there was "oppression," for example: 
11 All this," the plantations and the penal code, " was 
the result not of any deliberate policy of oppression, 
but of the prevalence of English law in a country 
where English conditions did not hold good." To 
speak of " prevalence " in this fashion is humorless, 
unless one takes a Germanic view of the sanction of 
force. And Mr. Barker inclines to prove too much, 
as when he sees little but nature in the great famine. 
" We can only attach blame to natural causes, which 
it is futile to blame." " Between 18 16 and 1843," 
he says later, " Parliament had passed some thirty 
Acts in favor of landlords." He does not connect 

[ 200 ] 



this evil record with the famine to which it so obvi- 
ously contributed. Still, ignoring such bias, the legis- 
lative accomplishment that inspires Mr. Barker is 
not to be disputed, and it is refreshing to turn to his 
summary of it. 

It began with the Irish Church Act of 1869, lo- 
cating £16,000,000 of assets; £8,000,000 to the 
Episcopal church, £750,000 to the Presbyterians, 
£370,000 to the Catholics, and the residual £7,000,- 
000 to advance purchase money to the church ten- 
ants, aid education and relieve distress. Was this 
charity? Certainly not. All of it was Irish money. 
England simply ceased to make a gift of it to a 
madly incongruous institution. The institution of 
feudal landlordism, almost equally incongruous, was 
similarly dispossessed. An Irishman would be a 
churl who did not recognize the substantial settle- 
ment of the landlord question and admire the uncom- 
promising terms in which it was settled. Already 
£125,000,000 has been paid to the owners of Irish 
estates, £60,000,000 more being still required before 
the last of tenants' land will be relinquished by land- 
lords. What was once paid as rent is now paid to 
the government as an instalment on purchase money: 
and within seventy years, by this exercise of state 
credit the common people of Ireland will, if the act 
goes undisturbed, be once more owners of Irish soil. 
At the same time, superlative as the benefit of this 
legislation is proving, it is historically inaccurate to 
regard it as having sprung in full dress clothes out 
of a British sense of justice. Decades before the 
idea was tolerated by Britons at large, it was pas- 
sionately urged by Irishmen, sometimes by reformers 
like George Moore's father, sometimes by wild men 

[ 201 ] 



like James Fintan Lalor. Cobden and Bright and 
Mill received slim encouragement from the English 
parties to go to the root of Irish distress. When 
the issue was joined the junkers fought hard and 
ruthlessly. Legislation came after a cruel and 
bloody struggle, practically a revolution, with whole- 
sale evictions going before it and coercion throttling 
the agitation whenever it disturbed the existing order. 
British statesmen sipped at their dosage reluctantly. 
The acts of 1870, 1881, 1885, 1891, 1896, 1903, 
1906, 1907, 1909, do not suggest one heroic gulp. 
Now that the potion is down, however, there is an 
Etonian pride in the manfulness of the achievement, 
and the men who proffered the medicine are forgot- 
ten. It is a matter of no great importance, but be- 
fore Englishmen arrogate to themselves the credit 
for Irish reforms, it would be wise of them to follow 
a noble example in acknowledging who initiated 
Irish reforms. " Without a single exception, so far 
as I know," said the Marquess of Crewe in 19 13, 
" the various benefits conferred upon Ireland by the 
imperial parliament during the last half-century have 
all formed part of the nationalist programme and 
the nationalist propaganda." 

Mr. Arthur Balfour's scheme for remedying the 
economic tuberculosis of the west of Ireland was a 
good scheme, even though the condition was a dis- 
grace to England the world over, and had certainly 
been unspeakably neglected down to 1891. Similarly 
useful have been the acts for laborers' cottages and 
town tenants and evicted tenants' reinstatement and 
government credit to the occupiers of new holdings. 
These acts have not given Ireland agricultural 
welfare, but, with the upper house bullied into ac- 

[ 202 ] 



quiescence, they did clean up purulent landlordism. 

But out of Westminster came more than this. 
Besides several futile efforts to have the home rule 
baby there was a useful local government act in 
1898, deposing the landlords and establishing elec- 
tive rural and county councils. This occurred, it 
must be said, after twelve local government bills had 
been killed from 1836 to 1893, with four others 
stillborn. In 1899, thanks to Sir Horace Plunkett's 
zeal, came the department of agriculture and techni- 
cal instruction. The broader issue of higher educa- 
tion remained. It was tackled in 1908 by the estab- 
lishment of a national university (Dublin, Cork, 
Galway) and a local university at Belfast. In 1908 
old age pensions were enacted for Ireland. With 
the parliament act twilight descended on the Lords 
and in 19 14, though one might not believe it, home 
rule became law, after the Lords were induced to 
their " twilight sleep." 

This is a handsome record. What have the Irish 
to complain about? No wonder Mr. Barker be- 
lieves that Irish criticism is lurid, that the country 
" doesn't know what it wants," as Punch said, " and 
won't be happy till it gets it." 

But it is too easy to run away with the idea that 
state grants to Ireland are exceptional charity, that 
Ireland is a drain on the empire strongly and silently 
suffered, that there is nothing more in reason to be 
done. Everything depends, of course, where your 
observation is taken from. To the crated Malay 
prisoner, a cell in Sing Sing would be paradise. To 
the Sing Sing convict, the bare liberty to roam in 
Ireland would be joy. I am not viewing Ireland as 
a suppliant, or its freedom as a remittance of pun- 

[ 203 ] 



ishments. I am taking Mr. Barker's own concep- 
tion, " a living home of divine freedom," with the 
power of self-determination fairly devised for Irish- 
men, and unequal burdens removed. It is only from 
this standpoint of the freeman that any state can be 
judged, unless one is frankly a tory. " It is our 
custom in Ireland," Mr. Bernard Shaw has cheerily 
confessed, " to denounce grievances which we share 
with all modern nations as intolerable and special 
outrages unknown beyond our shores and abhorrent 
to God and man." Englishmen relish this sort of 
general confession, but they forget both the pre- 
tensions of their own country and the hard com- 
parative facts. 

The bald issue of state aid is itself too readily 
misunderstood. When Mr. T. P. Gill appeared 
before the committee on Irish finance in 191 1 he 
freely acknowledged the grants for agricultural in- 
struction, but he showed how similar grants were the 
custom elsewhere, and how rapidly they increased; 
in Holland from £56,000 in 1894 to £262,000 in 
191 1 ; in Belgium from £112,000 to £224,000; in 
Switzerland from £150,000 to £219,000; in Hun- 
gary from £1,700,000 to £2,451,000; and in Den- 
mark from £108,000 to £232,000. In Ireland the 
grants for technical instruction increased from £10,- 
000 to £57,000 in the same period. These figures 
are suggestive in themselves; their main import is 
the unexceptional character of most Irish appropri- 
ations. 

GALL AND WORMWOOD 
The Ireland that Mr. Barker has written about 
from the calm of Oxford appears in a very different 
[ 204 ] 



light to the common Irish, the disadvantaged ma- 
jority. It is not only the pernicious anaemia of their 
population that afflicts them — the death rate high, 
the birth rate on the level of France before the 
war. They have other disabilities besides disabili- 
ties of public education and commercial opportunity, 
unnational banking and railway management, bad 
housing in the municipalities and a generally shriv- 
elled civic life. Despite all the work of liberalism 
in England, the ancien regime of Ireland is still 
twined into the state establishments. It is curled 
into the judiciary like a tropical germ. It has its 
tentacles in every nook of the Castle, living on large 
emoluments at the expense of popular need. The 
resident magistrates give one choice example of its 
tradition, the royal Irish constabulary give another. 
There is not only uneconomic organization in many 
departments of government, there is petty favorit- 
ism and anti-nationalism extending into civil life. 
The officers of the government do not, as a rule, 
regard themselves as servants of the people. They 
regard themselves as outside and above the aborig- 
ines, and they exhibit and nourish the aspect of a 
caste. This peculiarity of English government in 
Ireland has been responsible for a great part of the 
misunderstanding between England and Ireland. At 
every turn the governmental caste reminds Ireland 
of its history, the terms of its conquest, the perpetu- 
ation of that conquest. Nothing, not the police or 
the judiciary or the land commission or the local 
government board or the board of education or the 
centralized charities or the civil service, is free from 
the caste implication. It goes out beyond govern- 
ment, of course. The garrison has its own clubs, 

[ 205 ] 



its own games, its newspapers, its doctors, its ivied 
walls of ignorance and self-sufficiency; and the na- 
tives who pass those walls leave nationalism outside. 
Here you have the gall and wormwood of Ireland's 
conquest, surviving the land laws and the congested 
district board and the beneficent legislation of Eng- 
land. Here is one reason why ambition emigrates 
and despair sits heavily at home. 

THE BAULKED DISPOSITION 

The American can scarcely understand these impu- 
tations. They sound like the obscuring passion of 
which Mr. Barker speaks. A Jew, perhaps, would 
understand. When the Jew cries aloud of his " two 
thousand years of exile," he is thinking not only of 
Zion but of the ghetto, the exclusion that is the seal 
of exile. But the American does not know what it 
is to have the offices of government inaccessible to a 
majority of his people, because of their nationalism 
and race and religion. He is inclined to believe that 
such accusations come more from unrepleted office- 
seekers than from excluded groups and classes, and 
it is difficult for him even to grasp the realities of 
such genuinely excluded minorities as his own I. W. 
W. Though he accepts the idea of home rule, the 
status of the Irish people is not clear to him. He is 
content to favor home rule on the rough principle 
of self-government. 

But the main reason that self-government is imper- 
ative is the impossibility of good government with- 
out it, if by government one means something more 
than law and order. The discontentment, subtle and 
poisonous, which ferments in men who are less than 
full men in their own community, may properly 
[ 206 ] 



be ascribed to what Mr. Graham Wallas terms 
" baulked disposition." It is easy, at this point, to 
provoke the sarcasm of a man like Mr. Balfour, 
with his sharp references to " the appetite for self- 
assertion." It is always easy to cast doubt on the 
aspiration of other men to govern themselves, to see 
in their restlessness a kicking against the pricks of 
duty and conscience. But so long as men are insti- 
tutionally handicapped the fact of their unhappiness 
is eloquent. The very existence of an obscuring pas- 
sion in Irishmen is, at the least, a sign that their 
conditions of government had better be scrutinized. 
It would be sentimental to say in advance that the 
only remedy possible is more self-government. It is 
enough at the moment to search for the political 
grounds of this baulked disposition, not to propose 
its remedy. 

The accusatory note is struck by an Englishman. 
Speaking in 19 13 in the House of Lords, close to the 
end of Mr. Barker's fifty remedial years, Lord Mor- 
ley undertook to characterize the governance of Ire- 
land. " I submit this to your Lordships," said this 
statesman of thirty years' Irish experience and fifty 
years' thinking on Ireland. " I have no desire to 
figure as an oracle of political wisdom, but there is 
nothing worse in the whole range of the political 
system than irresponsible power. Any one who has 
thought at all about these things in theory or ob- 
served them in practice will cheerfully admit that. 
The whole administrative system of Ireland is sealed, 
stamped and branded with irresponsibility from top 
to bottom, and my noble friend Lord Crewe did not 
go a bit too far when he said, speaking from his own 
experience, which is very much mine, that it was 

[ 207 ] 



really Crown Colony Government masked and dis- 
guised." These are strong words, uttered by a man 
who weighs his words. They are worthy to be the 
epitaph of the union. 

The keynote of English administration in Ireland 
is one principle — distrust. Where the government 
is in the hands of a free people, administration may 
also be distrustful. It is in the nature of a popu- 
lace to ask miracles of the governors and of gov- 
ernors to regard the populace as objects. But in 
Ireland the government has made administration in 
the spirit and image of distrust. Since the coming 
of Parnell the Irish bureaucracy has lost much of its 
close semblance to the bureaucracy of Russia : its im- 
pervious judiciary, its Cossacks, its secret service, its 
pogroms. The espousal of Ireland by Gladstone 
brought about a sufficient change in serfdom to end 
the unchecked tyranny of the bureaucrats. But the 
institution of those tyrants, their tortuous mechan- 
ism, remains. Ireland has left its cell, it still wears 
handcuffs. Those handcuffs keep its history alive. 
It has no freedom to spend its own money, to invest 
its own capital, to promote its own capital, to pro- 
mote its own welfare. It has no freedom to unmake 
the administrator who does not suit it, or to advance 
the administrator who does. At every movement or 
gesture, distrust intervenes and represses Ireland. 
Distrust is the true king of Ireland. 

The nominal ruler is the lord lieutenant, but the 
real ruler, the lord of misrule, is the chief secretary. 
He is the man who carries Irish administration under 
his hat. Through the bureaucracy of Dublin Castle, 
in some measure responsive to his bidding, he man- 
ages the people of Ireland. He is always, of course, 
[ 208 ] 



an Englishman or a Scotchman. In most cases he 
has been actively anti-nationalist. Where he has 
wished to respond to the people, the machinery has 
greatly handicapped him. But with brilliant and 
wholly admirable exceptions he has been content to 
accept a " wasteful, inefficient and demoralising 
system." 

We have heard from several secretaries what it 
was like to sponsor Irish policy in a British cabinet 
— crying " Ireland," " Ireland," like a magpie. 
The Irish secretary has ever been a witch-doctor, a 
nuisance or a bore. While his colleagues have en- 
dured him and the Irish members at times cooper- 
ated with him, the task of being responsible for all 
the boards that govern Ireland has been like a buf- 
foon's attempt to carry forty Christmas packages. 
The effort that has saved one has spilled another. 
Besides such obvious tasks as running his own office, 
the chief secretary has to be the deity of the local 
government board, the congested districts board, the 
royal Irish constabulary, the land commission, the 
department of agriculture and technical instruction, 
the estates commissioners, the board of national edu- 
cation, the board of intermediate education. There 
are, besides, the registrar of petty sessions clerks, 
the general prisons board, the office of inspectors of 
lunatic asylums, the Dublin metropolitan police, the 
office of reformatory and industrial schools, the pub- 
lic loan fund board, the registrar-general's office, the 
establishment of charitable donations and bequests. 
These are only a few of the twenty-six boards which, 
as Mr. G. F.-H. Berkeley summarizes them, are 
directly under the influence of the Castle, with sal- 
aries ranging from £45,000 for the lord lieutenant's 

[ 209 ] 



household, £28,000 for the chief secretary's, £67,000 
for the local government board, down to innumer- 
able clerkships at £80. There are Irish branches of 
the English board of trade, stationery office, civil 
service commission, post office, and so on, with sub- 
offices of the treasury, all of them irresponsible and 
most of them unnational or anti-national. 

Lord Morley spelled out the meaning of Dublin 
Castle to his noble and learned friends, on and off 
the woolsack. " The chief secretary, the responsible 
minister in parliament, has to be most part of his 
time now, when sessions last from January to De- 
cember, in London. How can he exercise direct 
supervision and control over his departments, and 
how can the departments keep themselves in touch 
with their chief, or, for that matter, with opinion in 
Ireland? What responsibility is there for finance 
in the Irish secretary? It is in the hands of the 
board of works, which is the British Treasury; and 
I would perfectly confidently appeal to any noble 
lord from Ireland, whether he comes from Ulster or 
elsewhere, whether there is any sense of responsi- 
bility for treasury money either in his own order or 
amongst humbler people. I confess I wish there 
was a little more sense of responsibility for the ex- 
penditure of public funds even in this country. 
There are those who find us here somewhat slack, 
and lavish in expenditure, but in Ireland there is not 
a spark of sensibility for the British treasury. It is 
a point of honor almost, if British Treasury money 
is going, to get as much as possible and on no account 
to let one single banknote or coin be given up. The 
result, of course, is wholly bad. Irresponsible power 
breeds irresponsible people." And he adds, " Who 

[ 210 ] 



is most likely to take the right measure of the re- 
sources of Ireland — the treasury here or people in 
Ireland? . . . You want somebody in Ireland feel- 
ing the whole atmosphere of Ireland around them." 

IRELAND ON PAROLE 

This is part of the colonists' crushing mortgage 
on Ireland. It may seem small to indict England 
for setting aside £45,000 of Irish money for the 
household of the lord lieutenant — much more than 
is given to the President of the United States. But 
that is only one dropsical appropriation. The sal- 
aries of the Irish judiciary are scandalously large, 
the lord chancellor absorbing £6,000 a year, the lord 
chief justice £5,000, the lords justices £4,000 each, 
the justices £3,500, and judicial commissioners of 
the land commission £3,500 and £3,000, the re- 
corder £2,500, the county court judges £1,400 each. 
It may be that the Irish " like good law better than 
cheap law," but a reactionary judge is dear at any 
price and appointments are still dealt out as fat re- 
wards to men of the right politics in Ireland. Legal 
talent puts on its incorruption at too great an expense 
to the public. The royal Irish constabulary is an- 
other monstrosity. It costs the Irish people £1,500,- 
000 a year. " The constabulary," says a perma- 
nent under-secretary for Ireland, " is really an impe- 
rial force; it is employed not merely for the purposes 
of preserving the public peace, but for the mainte- 
nance of civil government in Ireland in its existing 
form. It is a semi-military force, and it may be 
almost considered as an army of occupation rather 
than as a police force." Useful duties are per- 
formed by the underworked police, such as collect- 

[ 211 ] 



ing data for the inland revenue office, the registrar- 
general's office, the census office; but the force is op- 
pressive socially as well as financially. Nothing in 
England's system of governing Ireland has given the 
lie to goodwill so completely as this standing army. 
All through the country the poorhouses and the police 
barracks compete with each other as monuments to 
British government. Considering their function the 
constables are remarkably kind and human, but they 
offer an insuperable obstacle to Irish confidence in 
England. Their presence indicates to Ireland that 
England's dagger is always hanging at its hand, 
ready to be unsheathed tomorrow as it was un- 
sheathed yesterday, a perpetual intimidation and a 
perpetual goad. I do not mean that the constabu- 
lary is truculent. If there were any excuse for it 
there would be every excuse for it. Its offence is 
not its conduct but its existence. It proclaims that 
the whole Irish nation is simply on parole. There 
is absolutely nothing in Ireland's criminal statistics 
to justify this situation. The police is a political 
police, " for the maintenance of civil government in 
Ireland in its existing form." 

THE OLD GUARD 

But the parole is not confined to the police. 
When Lord Morley went to Ireland the second time, 
in 1892, he confronted "the paradox of a magis- 
tracy mainly Protestant in a country predominantly 
Catholic." Shrewdly protecting himself from his 
nationalist advisers, he began appointing Catholic 
magistrates. " We appointed 637 county justices 
over the heads of the lieutenants of counties: 554 of 
them Catholics, 83 Protestants. But consider the 

[ 212 ] 



state of things after our felonious operation was 
over. We reduced the old Protestant ascendancy 
from between 3 and 4 to 1, to a proportion of rather 
more than 2 to 1. Add that the majority of 2 to 1 
on the bench represents a minority of 1 to 3 in popu- 
lation. For this we were severely criticized as intro- 
ducing the poison germ of the spoils system into the 
virgin purity of Irish public life." 

Now we begin to close in on the realities of Ire- 
land. Remembering that Catholic means autoctho- 
nous and Protestant means colonist, (though the 
colonist is sometimes the better democrat and the 
better nationalist), we find that the governing class 
still rides its fences carefully, and mends its pali- 
sades. Between English and Irish, in Mr. Balfour's 
view, "there is no sharp division of race at all"; 
but before accepting this bland utterance, it is well 
to look at the south of Ireland in the year 19 14, and 
make one's own inferences. 

On July 19-20, 1 9 14, two quarterly meetings 
were held in Kilkenny — one a meeting of the county 
United Irish League, the other a meeting of the 
county grand jury. Side by side, the first twenty 
names of each list is worth contrasting, to see the 
difference, if any, between the men selected as dele- 
gates by a home organization, and the men selected 
by a foreign government. They were selected from 
over exactly the same area, at the same time, and 
with the idea of representation in mind: 

United Irish 

League Grand Jury 

Henry J. Meagher Richard Henry Prior Wandesforde 
Thomas Long Edward K. B. Tighe 

John Bryan Major James H. Connellan 

[ 213 ] 



United Irish 
League 
Richard Nolan 
Peter Barret 
Nicholas Maher 
Thomas Lyster 
P. Lennon 
John Walton 
Richard Kerwin 
Richard Kinahan 
Andrew Dillon 
James Murphy 
Daniel Roberts 
Edward Corr 
Denis Lennon 
Nicholas Cruit 
Thomas Lambert 
John Buggy 
Patrick Wall 



Grand Jury 

Gen'l Sir Hugh McCalmont 

Major Robert T. H. Hanford 

Raymond de la Poer 

Stanislaus T. Eyre 

Lieut. Col. Walter Lindsay 

Sir William Blunden 

Col. Charles Butler-Kearney 

Mervyn de Montmorency 

Major Lindesey Knox 

John Butler 

John T. Seigne 

Capt. John de Montmorency 

Major John J. E. Poe 

Charles S. Purdon, M.D. 

William T. Pilsworth 

Paul Hunt 

James Smithwick 



Among the United Irish Leaguers the ethnologist 
will undoubtedly see a large proportion of Anglic 
names. Kilkenny is an Anglicized county. But the 
distinction is not ethnological, it is social. On the 
one side is the Catholic, the bourgeois, and the 
farmer, on the other side is the Protestant, the petty 
aristocrat and the landowner. Four Catholics had 
penetrated into the grand jury in 19 14. The Cath- 
olics are 95% in Kilkenny. Not more than one 
Protestant has penetrated into the United Irish 
League. The compartments are almost, though not 
absolutely, water-tight. 

But it is better to supplement this illustration of 
caste rigidity from a national board. At the risk 
of boring the reader I give the contrast in the same 
year between the popularly-selected chairmen of the 

[ 214 ] 



county councils in Catholic Ireland, and the oligarchic 
custodes rotulorum or deputy lieutenants : 



County Council 

W. McM. Kavanagh 
P. J. O'Neill 
Matthew J. Minch 
John Butler 
John Dooly 
John Phillips 
Peter Hughes 
Thomas Halligan 
Patrick A. Meehan 
Joseph P. O'Dowdall 
John Bolger 
Edward P. Kelly 
James O'Regan 
William M. Donald 
D. M. Moriarty 
W. R. Gubbins 
Michael Slattery 
Patrick O'Gorman 
Thomas G. Griffin 
Thomas Fallon 
James McGarry 
John FitzGibbon 
John O'Dowd 



Lieutenants 
Lord Rathdonnel 
Earl of Meath 
Sir A. Weldon 
Marquess of Ormonde 
Earl of Rosse 
Earl of Longford 
Sir H. Bellingham 
Sir N. T. Everard 
Sir Algernon Coote 
Lord Castlemaine 
Viscount Stopford 
Viscount Powerscourt 
Sir Michael O'Loghlen 
Earl of Bandon 
Earl of Kenmare 
Earl of Dunraven 
Lord Dunalley 
Count de la Poer 
Lord Clonbrock 
Lord Harlech 
Earl of Lucan 
The O'Conor Don 
Major Charles Kean O'Hara 



These lists mark with tolerable clearness the lusty 
survival of a distinct Anglo-Irish class in Ireland. 
The men chosen by the people are of the people. 
They could not say, as the Earl of Wicklow had 
just said, " We are very proud of being Irishmen, 
but we are, I think, immeasurably more proud of 
being able also to call ourselves English, or perhaps 
I ought to say British." They could not say, with 
the same gentleman, " We are not ashamed to be 

[ 215 ] 



called the English garrison in Ireland. There have 
been English garrisons in many parts of the world, 
and I do not know that any member of such a gar- 
rison ever had cause to feel anything but proud of 
his position." These Murphys and Dillons and 
Lennons and Nolans were the garrisoned rather than 
the garrison, so far as full political freedom is con- 
cerned. 

THE GARRISONED 

The point is not a legal one, exactly. Even if 
there are fifty hired governmental magistrates in 
Ireland, even if the clerks of the crown and peace 
are usually in ascendancy, even if juries in crucial 
times have been packed, the real disadvantage is not 
so immediately tangible. The real disadvantage is 
the affirmation of ascendancy, the social and politi- 
cal barrage. Nothing is more precious in society 
than the free play of personality, the right of un- 
guarded being and doing. There is not a county in 
Ireland where the inferiority of native Irishmen is 
not protested by some instrument of the ascendancy, 
whether it is their magisterial office or their asser- 
tion of Englishness or their eight-foot stone walls. 
Canon Hannay wrote in 191 1 that this embittered 
feeling is going. " I left the English schools at 
which I received the earlier part of my education 
when I was seventeen," he says. " Since then I have 
lived entirely in Ireland — in the north, in Dublin, 
and in the west. I can look back on twenty-eight 
years during which I have been familiar with Irish 
social life. I have seen a great change take place. 
When I was a young man intercourse between Irish 
Protestants and Irish Roman Catholics was rare in 
[ 216 ] 



every rank of society. We lived apart from each 
other. We very seldom met. We never talked 
about anything that mattered. This condition of 
things has absolutely passed away. There is now 
far freer intercourse, far more social intermingling 
in all classes. We are beginning to know each other. 
This change has taken place in spite of the warnings 
and exhortations of the clergy of all kinds. From 
their own point of view the clergy were right in their 
objection to the gradual breaking down of the wall 
of division. The inevitable happened. Young men 
and young women who danced together, played to- 
gether, perhaps debated together, came to want to 
marry each other. Then the trouble began." 

Canon Hannay knows Ireland too well not to be 
quoted and I regret I cannot agree with him. The 
political incrustations of ascendancy are tough incrus- 
tations, the rewards of ascendancy are still positive. 
One reason of this is not so much the unionism of 
Irishmen as the unionism of Englishmen, and the 
doctrine of military necessity. 

DIRA NECESSITAS 

It has never been a secret in militarist circles that 
home rule is undesirable. If the foible of national- 
ists is chewing the bitter past, they share it with Lord 
Ellenborough and Earl Percy and even the unmih- 
tant elect of the Round Table. The " ruinous heri- 
tage of ancient wrong " is deplored by The Common- 
wealth of Nations, but one of its appendices is that 
strange document in separatism, Wolfe Tone's 
pamphlet advocating Irish neutrality in 1790. This 
foolish preoccupation with Ireland's military position 
is not confined to the hunters of political linseed bags. 

[ 217 ] 



Lord Ellenborough avowed in 19 13 that there would 
be no difficulty about giving Ireland home rule if 
Ireland were thousands of miles away. " Even if 
the Irish government remained loyal," this states- 
man ventured, " there would be the disadvantage of 
a divided authority, or of having two civil govern- 
ments in time of war. If during war the civil au- 
thorities do not guard railways, tunnels and bridges, 
in an efficient manner, they may be blown up." 
Someone said in 1688, " Without the subjugation of 
Ireland England cannot flourish, and perhaps not 
subsist." Lord Ellenborough comments, " every 
word is as true now as it was 225 years ago. . . . 
Autonomy has been a success in Canada, Australia, 
and New Zealand, and it may yet be a success in 
South Africa. But these countries are thousands of 
miles away. Ireland is only 12 miles distant, and is 
far more intimately connected with naval strategy. 
... If home rule is granted, a three-power stand- 
ard, instead of a two-power standard, must be kept 
up." 

The mainstay of such alarmed statesmen is the 
late Admiral Mahan. " It is impossible," the ad- 
miral said, " for a military man or a statesman with 
appreciation of military conditions, to look at the 
map and not perceive that the ambition of the Irish 
separatists, realized, would be even more threaten- 
ing to the national life than the secession of the South 
was to that of the American Union." 

This is the spinal column of Earl Percy's argu- 
ment. Writing in 191 2, he made no attempt to con- 
ceal his belief in the coming war with Germany. 
11 Many of those best qualified to judge are of opin- 
ion that Germany is only waiting to free herself of 
[ 218 ] 



an embarrassing situation, until the power of the 
Triple Entente is for the time being too much occu- 
pied to intervene in a Continental struggle. ... In 
Europe the nations have set out on the march to 
Armageddon, and there is no staying the progress 
of their armaments." Therefore home rule is im- 
possible. Before the war Earl Percy believed in 
forcing conscription on Ireland out of hand. Ac- 
knowledging it impossible, he candidly declared that 
" if the passing of home rule should require the re- 
tention of a single extra soldier in Ireland, it is per- 
fectly certain that nothing could justify the adoption 
of such measure," and " even if home rule could be 
shown to be an act of justice due to a wronged peo- 
ple who have proved themselves capable of self- 
government, even then it could not be justified in the 
present crisis abroad." 

This is admirably honest, but, I think, hateful. It 
is simply the English variety of the worst German 
ideals. It is precisely the argument of General von 
Bissing in relation to Belgium. He speaks of " the 
1 dira necessitas,' or rather the sacred duty, that we 
should retain Belgium for our influence and sphere 
of power, and in the interests of German security 
that we should not give Belgium up." As Earl 
Percy speaks of Irish horses and man-power, so von 
Bissing speaks of Belgian factories. " A neutral 
Belgium, or an independent Belgium based upon 
treaties of a different kind, will succumb to the disas- 
trous influence of England and France, and to the 
effort of America to exploit Belgian resources. 
Against all this our only weapon is the policy of 
power, and this policy must see to it that the Belgian 
population, now still hostile to us, shall adapt itself 

[ 219 ] 



and subordinate itself, if only gradually, to the Ger- 
man domination. It is also necessary that, by a 
peace which will secure the linking up of Belgium 
with Germany, we shall be able to give the necessary 
protection to the Germans who have settled in the 
country." 

THE MORAL 

No sane American can believe in von Bissing's 
policy. Yet, in all its moods and tenses, even to 
the protection of German " unionists," it has the 
same ethics as Earl Percy's policy. In one case it is 
Germany first. In the other case it is Britain first. 
Aside from its baseness, its notion of human psychol- 
ogy seems to be foolish, no less in the English case 
than in the German. But my point is its influence 
on the government of Ireland. It is the worst influ- 
ence operating against the Irish people at present — 
honestly revealed by these junkers I have quoted, 
half-revealed by men in and around the cabinet. 

Is this Mr. Ernest Barker's notion of " the living 
home of divine freedom"? Twelve thousand po- 
licemen haunting the streets and byeroads of Ireland 
do not suggest divine freedom. There is little free- 
dom in a colonized judiciary, a reckless treasury, an 
irresponsible educational board, a country planted 
throughout with the moated castles of antipathetic 
officialdom. The forty-two cliques of Dublin Castle, 
alienated when not prejudiced, repress the activity of 
every local council in the country. Those councils, 
baulked in other directions, deviate into political 
manifesto. One may agree with Mr. Barker that 
the difficulties of Ireland are largely within the bor- 
ders of Ireland. But what does this prove? When 

[ 220 ] 



a man is riddled with disease, the difficulty is all too 
seriously within him. If the British empire is in 
truth a commonwealth, let the notions of common- 
weal be applied to Ireland for its sanity. Let the 
first principles of liberty be allowed to touch it, and 
the tide of national vigor released. 



[ 221 ] 



VIII 
THE NATIONAL LEGACY 

WHY NATIONALISM? 

IT is not because one is infatuated with the Irish 
people that their nationalistic struggle is seen pri- 
marily as a human cause. The disabilities of Cath- 
olic Irishmen are important not because they are 
Irish or because they are Catholic but because they 
have disabilities. It is this that gives democratic 
sanction to the emphasis on their nationhood. 
There is another emphasis on nationhood, the cul- 
tural, which intrudes patent difficulties into the 
sphere of the state. This is so much the case that 
disabilities take the attention of many nationalists 
only because their culture and their peculiarity are 
affected. With such partisans there is frequently no 
middle way. Their differentiation becomes as sa- 
cred, exclusive and imperious as it dares. Such 
arrogance, however, inheres in all differentiation. 
It is often necessary to penalize it, and a pleasure to 
do so, but you cannot get rid of it by crushing it, 
only by directing it. Most of statecraft, indeed, un- 
less it be leviathan or stone-age statecraft, consists 
in harnessing these barbarous and obnoxious va- 
rieties of the will to power. 

When you think of nationalism merely as group 
particularism it seems wholly unworthy of political 
science; and political scientists as a rule shy away 
[ 222 ] 



from sanctioning nationalism. In some respects, I 
am afraid, the modern political scientist is not un- 
like the political economist of fifty years ago. He 
much prefers to deal with issues uncontaminated by 
human nature. The war has changed many things 
and the war may have changed this, but throughout 
discussions of government and the state one is still 
constantly aware of intense willingness to see good 
systematic thinking deranged by unmalleable con- 
glomerates of fact. I have in mind, as I write, the 
kind of federalist who simply closes his eyes to ex- 
isting social and economic partitions, partitions 
which need to be removed, which nationalism pro- 
poses to remove, which federalism blandly and in- 
humanly accepts. If there were no established 
class to monopolize government, nationalism would 
be a wild political incursion. But nationalism fairly 
enters politics as a protestant if not a constructive 
factor. At least to the degree that government 
bears upon members of a national group they are 
bound, united by their particularism, to assert them- 
selves in regard to government. If one opposes 
this tendency, while failing to liberate government 
itself from the undue influence of an established class, 
the result is to create that very injustice which it is 
the pretension of political science to cancel. Hence 
political science really begins, or ought to begin, with 
bringing government to a nationalistic state of 
grace. 

THE NATIONAL LEADERS 

The main difficulty in accommodating Irish gov- 
ernment to Irish nationalism has been the fallen 
estate of the nationalist claimants. There has been 

[ 223 ] 



at once no greater proof of this statement and no 
greater testimonial to human nature than the con- 
stituence of Irish leadership. One of the greatest 
leaders was a Catholic, O'Connell, but with his ex- 
ception the vast majority of political leaders have 
been Protestants. The luminaries of Grattan's par- 
liament were necessarily Protestant. It was not till 
1793 that a Catholic was permitted to be a citizen 
or to aspire to education at an Irish university. 
But it was not merely Flood and Grattan who fought 
for Ireland, or, in earlier days, Swift and Molyneux. 
Wolfe Tone was a Protestant, so were Robert Em- 
met and Lord Edward Fitzgerald. After Cath- 
olic emancipation and the tithe war and the repeal 
movement came Young Ireland, with Protestants 
like Thomas Davis and Smith O'Brien and Ulster 
Presbyterians like John Mitchel to take up the fight 
for the people. Fenianism was largely Catholic, 
but the home rule movement was half Protestant 
and Orange to begin with, led by an Ulster Prot- 
estant, Isaac Butt. Parnell was a Protestant land- 
lord. One may make the inference, if one likes, 
that Catholic Irishmen need a Protestant chieftain. 
Or one may make the inference that between Cath- 
olic and Protestant there is no such invincible preju- 
dice as Ulster supposes. What really stands 
proved, it seems to me, is the inexorable claim on 
common humanity that was made on these Protes- 
tants by the lamentable state of Ireland. 

With their own eyes these men saw the violation 
of democratic principle at every turn, and, what- 
ever their heredity, they revolted, as Englishmen 
in England had similarly revolted, against English 
misrule. Gladstone and Morley, in this sense, were 
[ 224 ] 



Irish leaders too; but the poignancy of Ireland, the 
tragic import of her claims, could only be felt by 
men who had dipped their bread in the salt of ostra- 
cism. Parnell's hatred of England was unintelli- 
gible to John Bright. Bright repudiated home rule 
because of it. But Parnell had seen death in the 
eyes of landlorded peasants. The empire he beheld 
was not the great institution that Bright criticized as 
an engineer might criticize a beloved engine. Par- 
nell saw the empire as juggernaut, huge, self-consid- 
ering, beyond appeal. When Gladstone unjustly im- 
prisoned him he was not surprised. He was not 
surprised when Mr. Balfour denigrated Irish politi- 
cal prisoners, forced them to clean out water-closets. 
The zebra clothes with which the nationalist con- 
victs were clad symbolized to Parnell the thing he 
hated in the union, England's impunity. That im- 
punity was only too actual when he himself was 
" thrown to the wolves." His Protestantism was 
his inheritance, Ireland his experience. His experi- 
ence convinced him that between strong and weak 
the weak must suspect the strong, must pursue Go- 
liath relentlessly. Only heroism can save David. 
England's comfortable righteousness he ridiculed, 
and the righteousness was not a myth. It could jail 
him in 1880 for agitating a reform that the Unionists 
unctuously adopted in 1903. 

A giant's task 
If Parnell was feared by England, O'Connell was 
loathed and despised. It is amusing now to recall 
the note of the London Times on O'Connell's con- 
sultation with the lord lieutenant Mulgrave. " It 
has been proved beyond a doubt that Lord Mulgrave 

[ 225 ] 



has actually invited to dinner that rancorous and 
foul-mouthed ruffian, O'Connell." But this trucu- 
lence of the strong to the weak was more than calcu- 
lated political insult. Lord Morley has included in 
his life of Richard Cobden a letter that sadly illus- 
trates the division of the two peoples. " I found 
the populace of Ireland represented in the House by 
a body of men, with O'Connell at their head, with 
whom I could feel no more sympathy or identity 
than with people whose language I did not under- 
stand." So he wrote in 1848, looking back seven 
years. " In fact," he continued, " morally I felt a 
complete antagonism and repulsion toward them. 
O'Connell always treated me with friendly atten- 
tion, but I never shook hands with him or faced his 
smile without a feeling of insecurity; and as for 
trusting him on any public question where his vanity 
or passions might interpose, I should have as soon 
thought of an alliance with an Ashantee chief." It 
is interesting to turn from this to Morley's own 
opinion, fifty years after. " Goldwin Smith," he 
says, " hints that I am for home rule because I am 
ignorant of Ireland. His own personal knowledge 
of Ireland seems to have been acquired in a very 
short visit to a Unionist circle here thirty years ago ! 
What can be more shallow and ill-considered than 
to dismiss O'Connell ' as an agitator, not a states- 
man.' O'Connell's noble resolution, insight, per- 
sistency in lifting up his Catholic countrymen, in giv- 
ing them some confidence in themselves, in preach- 
ing the grand doctrine of union among Irishmen, and 
of toleration between the two creeds, in extorting 
justice from England and the English almost at the 

[ 226 ] 



point of the bayonet — all this stamps O'Connell as 
a statesman and a patriot of the first order." 

Is it irrelevant that Richard Cobden says of him- 
self, " [I] had frequently been in that country (I had 
a cousin, a rector of the Church of England in Tip- 
perary)"? 

O'Connell's task was gigantic, " lifting up his 
Catholic countrymen." A hundred years before he 
came, England had organized their degradation and 
Mr. Bagwell quotes Petty as to their condition at 
that time. "Of the inhabited houses 16,000 had 
more than one chimney, 24,000 had only one, leav- 
ing 160,000 without any. Three-fourths of the 
land and five-sixths of the houses belonged to British 
Protestants, and ' three-fourths of the native Irish 
lived in a brutish, nasty condition, as in cabins, with 
neither chimney, door, stairs, nor window, fed 
chiefly upon milk and potatoes.' " When Sir Wal- 
ter Scott visited Ireland in O'Connell's hour, 1825, 
there was astonishingly little change. The " heart 
of the stranger was sickened by such widespread 
manifestations of the wanton and reckless profligacy 
of human mismanagement, the withering curse of 
feuds and factions, and the tyrannous selfishness of 
absenteeism." Carlyle was to come later with his 
ironic ejaculation over their squalor and misery, 
" Black-lead them and put them over with the nig- 
gers." This was the clay that O'Connell modelled, 
to be duly transferred to Parnell. 

THE MORAL BOG HOE 
Did the world see cause and effect in the condi- 
tion of Irishmen, or did they infer from Irishmen's 

[ 227 ] 



degradation an innate barbarity and worthlessness? 
I shall only stop to cite those well-known passages 
in Walden relating to John Field. When Thoreau 
wrote Walden in 1 845-1 847 the Irish were the most 
degraded poor in America. Thousands of them 
were employed in railroad construction, and they 
were crowded in railroad shanties, " human beings 
living in sties." So closely were they associated 
with digging in the dirt, that Thoreau could not think 
of the hated railroad without thinking of " a million 
Irish, starting up from all the shanties in the land." 
" We do not ride on the railroad," said this New 
England Diogenes, " it rides upon us. Did you ever 
think what those sleepers are that underlie the rail- 
road? Each one is a man, an Irishman, or a Yankee 
man. The rails are laid on them, and they are cov- 
ered with sand, and the cars run smoothly over 
them. They are sound sleepers, I assure you." 
This, and the adumbration of native squalor that 
came with the immigrants, gave Thoreau his clue to 
Ireland. 

With such presumptions, Thoreau entered the 
hovel of John Field. John made his living near 
Walden as a laboring man. " An honest, hard- 
working, but shiftless man plainly was John Field; 
and his wife, she too was brave to cook so many suc- 
cessive dinners in the recesses of that lofty stove; 
with round greasy face and bare breast, still think- 
ing to improve her condition one day; with the never 
absent mop in one hand, and yet no effects of it 
visible anywhere." The picture is etched by a mas- 
ter. And then the master moralizes: " A man 
will not need to study history to find out what is best 
for his own culture. But alas! the culture of an 
[ 228 ] 



Irishman is an enterprise to be undertaken with a 
sort of moral bog hoe. ... I suppose they still 
take life bravely, after their fashion, giving it 
tooth and nail, not having skill to split its massive 
columns with any fine entering wedge, and rout it 
in detail; — thinking to deal with it roughly, as one 
should handle a thistle. But they fight at an over- 
whelming disadvantage, — living, John Field, alas ! 
without arithmetic, and failing so ! " 

UP FROM SLAVERY 

So far, excellent Thoreau. And then we come to 
the racial hypothesis. " Before I had reached the 
pond some fresh impulse had brought out John 
Field, with altered mind, letting go ' bogging ' ere 
this sunset. But he, poor man, disturbed only a 
couple of fins while I was catching a fair string, and 
he said it was his luck; but when we changed seats 
in the boat luck changed seats too. Poor John 
Field ! — I trust he does not read this, unless he will 
improve by it, — thinking to live by derivative old 
country mode in this primitive new country, — to 
catch perch with shiners. It is good bait sometimes, 
I allow. With his horizon all his own, yet he a 
poor man, born to be poor, with his inherited Irish 
poverty or poor life, his Adam's grandmother and 
boggy ways, not to rise in this world, he nor his pos- 
terity, till their wading webbed bog-trotting feet get 
talaria to their heels." 

There is more instruction in this threnody than 
in many a blue book. It goes a long way to sug- 
gest the depths of Irish slavery and the pitying pes- 
simism that so often condescends to it. In the re- 
action from that slavery, still by no means com- 

[ 229 ] 



pleted, it is easy to see how Irish nationalism took 
excessive forms. Social and economic hardship did 
not turn every Irishman into a hero. The politi- 
cians from whom Cobden shrank, for example, were 
many of them known to be venal and loathsome. 
Outside the genuine patriots and rebels, outside the 
sterling conciliators, there were innumerable fustian 
orators, cringing and fawning blackguards, com- 
promisers, buffoons, blusterers, louts, a scum of inso- 
lent and pretentious carpet-baggers, trading on Irish 
sorrows and capitalizing Irish wounds. This, apart 
from the sting of caustic, shows why Thackeray's 
delineation of Irish gentility made the genteel Irish 
hate him; why Synge's Playboy of the Western 
World touched a repressed feeling of inferiority. 
Nor were the excesses of nationalism always lowly. 
There was an excess in the exalted Gaelicism of the 
modern generation. There was a large element of 
passionate compensation for the past in the rebellion 
of 1916. 

THE LANDLORD'S SIDE 

But before one considers the reactions from 
slavery, one must look at the landlord's side of the 
case. Landlordism included all kinds of people, 
people in no way tyrannical, good bewildered people 
who never knew they were deemed blameworthy 
until they were walked out to the guillotine. In the 
way that many parsons under the established church 
were like Goldsmith's parson, as poor as church 
mice, so many landowners gave quite as much as 
they got under the miserable land system in Ireland. 

The late Miss Violet Martin, one of the authors 
of An Irish R.M., has left an illuminating 

[ 230 ] 



memoir of her brother, a Unionist " emergency 
man." In that memoir (the first chapter of Irish 
Memories) one is shown the other side of tenant and 
landlord. There is a glimpse of her family's be- 
loved Connaught estate, carried on since the days of 
Queen Elizabeth. Not till 1872, the first home rule 
election, were the kindly intimacies altered. All 
through the famine and Fenian days Ross went un- 
troubled. " The mutal dependence of landlord and 
tenant remained unshaken; it was a delicate relation, 
almost akin to matrimony, and like a happy marriage, 
it needed that both sides should be good fellows. 
The disestablishment of the Irish church came in 
1869, a direct blow at Protestantism, and an equally 
direct tax upon landlords for the support of their 
church, but of this revolution the tenants appeared 
to be unaware. In 1870 came Gladstone's land act, 
which by a system of fines shielded the tenant to a 
great extent from ' capricious eviction.' As evic- 
tions, capricious or otherwise, did not occur at Ross, 
this section of the act was not of epoch-making im- 
portance there; its other provisions, by which tenants 
became proprietors of their own improvements, was 
also something of a superfluity." 

Then, in 1872, the serpent of nationalism ap- 
peared in the Eden of feudalism. Miss Martin 
transcribes very distinctly the emotion of that first 
election. " It went without saying that my father 
gave his support to the Conservative, who was also a 
Galway man, and the son of a friend. Up to that 
time it was a matter of course that the Ross tenants 
voted with their landlord. . . . During the morn- 
ing my father ranged through the crowd incred- 
ulously, asking for this or that tenant, unable to be- 

[ 231 ] 



lieve that they had deserted him. It was a futile 
search; with a few valiant exceptions the Ross ten- 
ants, following the example of the rest of the constit- 
uency, voted according to the orders of the church, 
and Captain Nolan was elected by a majority of four 
to one. It was a priest from another part of the dio- 
cese, who gave forth the mandate, with an extraor- 
dinary fury of hate against the landlord side; one 
need not blame the sheep who passed in a frightened 
huddle from one fold to another. When my father 
came home that afternoon, even the youngest child 
of the house could see how great had been the blow. 
It was not the political defeat, severe as that was, 
it was the personal wound, and it was incurable. . . . 
The ballot act followed in June, but these things 
could not soothe the wounded spirit of the men who 
had trusted in their tenants." Miss Martin's father 
never recovered. 

Here you have kind and sympathetic feudalism, 
essentially aristocratic, yet essentially genial, extir- 
pated at the same time as its intolerable companions. 
No one, I think, can fail to see Miss Martin's affec- 
tion for the tenants; but the Ireland of the upstart 
tenant was a new Ireland to her, a questionable Ire- 
land, and she sided against home rule to the last. 
Stephen Gwynn, M.P., told this gifted Irishwoman 
in her own idiom that home rule was not necessarily 
part and parcel with cold desertions and broken 
fealties. She could not quite believe him. " There 
was ploughing going on," narrated Miss Martin to 
her correspondent in 19 12, " and all the good, quiet 
work that one longs to do, instead of brain-wringing 
inside four walls. I wondered deeply and sincerely 
whether home rule could increase the peacefulness, 
[ 232 ] 



or whether it will not be like upsetting a basket of 
snakes over the country? These people have 
bought their land. They manage their own local 
affairs. Must there be yet another upheaval for 
them? . . ." " Why snakes? " Captain Gwynn re- 
joined. " To my mind the present System breeds 
'snakes' . . . For Gentlefolk (to use the old 
word) who want to live in the country, Ireland is 
going to be a better place to live in than it has been 
these thirty years — yes, or than before, for it is bad 
for people to be a caste. . . . Caste is at the bottom 
of nine-tenths of our trouble." But to caste, quite 
valorously, Miss Martin continued to cling. 

THE GOOD SLAVEOWNER 

No social institution, whether it is landlordism or 
the priesthood or the army or Dublin Castle or 
prostitution, can entirely subvert human kindness. 
The good man of the worst regime is always superior 
to the poor man of the best regime, and no two 
system's are so far apart that they do not partially 
overlap. It is this that makes confiscation so anti- 
social, and makes compromise so obligatory. But 
landlordism, for all the goodness that extenuated its 
badness, for all its fine exponents and hot character 
witnesses, was justly sentenced to sell out. Every- 
thing that can be said for chattel slavery by an ex- 
slaveholder can be urged for the old landlord system 
in Ireland — and a man would be a fool to deride the 
pragmatic evidence of men and women from the 
south of the United States. But some commonplaces 
of human aspiration are better not debated. Hatred 
of slavery is one of them. Men are committed to 
the infinitely complex and dangerous and universal 

[ 233 ] 



experiment of self-determination, and the superb 
theorem of Abraham Lincoln — " No man is good 
enough to govern another man without that other's 
consent " — has something in it that surpasses the 
lonely Olympianism of Nietzsche. Obedience to 
the priest, as Miss Martin saw it, was no more self- 
determination than obedience to the landlord; but 
the history of land agitation shows that the tenants 
who bolted in 1872 were answering a deeper call 
than the call of clericalism. In point of fact, few 
priests favored home rule at the beginning. The 
tenants really deserted their landlord in 1872 be- 
cause the root of nationalism was in them. The 
new phrase, " home rule," pulsated with promise 
for them, a promise of something much more stirring 
than federalism, something fundamental, something 
that opened wide arms to them. Landlords still 
forget this. They still delude themselves to the 
contrary. In 19 13 Sir Reginald Pole-Carew con- 
fided to the House of Commons that " if you were 
to live as I do among farmers and go about and 
talk to them — I grant you singly, because if you 
get two together they dare not give an opinion — 
if you get them alone they tell you they are living 
now in fear and dread of getting home rule." What 
else, I wonder, did the farmers of Kilkenny tell that 
honorable and gallant gentleman? Did they tell 
him, by any chance, that they live in fear and dread 
of getting a bigger price for heifers? 

NOT ALL BOLSHEVIKI 

It would be wrong to suggest that Ireland was at 

a high pitch of nationalism at the time of which Sir 

Reginald Pole-Carew was speaking. Its nationalism 

E 234 ] 



was not so flaccid as he wished to think, but until the 
executions of 19 16 it did show many signs of being 
too thwarted to assert itself. From 1894 to 19 14 
the south of Ireland was tired of pugnacious nation- 
alism. Here I think it may be ventured that the 
long repression of personality, the long disregard 
of will, had undoubtedly left effects on the native 
Irish. Superficially, at any rate, Ireland is a country 
with an undue proportion of mild, innocuous, charm- 
ing people, easily swayed from their set purposes, 
disposed to say " yes " to the latest agreeable sug- 
gestion, rather unusually averse to the Puritan habit 
of moral bookkeeping, twice as pleasant for casual 
acquaintance on that account, but prevented by this 
characteristic from attaining the valuable results that 
are won by the resolute and the self-preserving. 
The main difference between the Englishman and the 
Irishman is probably this difference in steady voli- 
tion, this difference as to what is admired as " per- 
severance." A serious lack in the business of life, 
it is a quality inevitably cultivated where men have 
the habit of property and the political conviction of 
self-help. The absence of perseverance by no means 
justifies the hideous morbid introspection that un- 
derlies the melancholy of Ireland. Nor is it a char- 
acteristic peculiar to Ireland. Closely connected 
with lonely agriculturalism, it is much more des- 
perate both in kind and degree in the genius of the 
politically retarded Russians. One finds it less fre- 
quently in the United States, where prosperity amel- 
iorates rural life to some slight degree. In New 
England, however, there is the morbidity that one 
finds in the south of Ireland — less dreamy, but not 
less intractable, and leading to the same helpless 

[ 235 ] 



depression. It is, in fact, a sort of childishness, 
which takes the struggle of life with too intense a 
seriousness, and centres on itself, and becomes para- 
lyzed. Many of the early plays of the Abbey 
Theatre bear witness to the depth of Irish neuras- 
thenia. The re-birth of Irish culture was genuine 
but the baby was a bluish baby. 

THE ENGLISH BIBLE 

In the average Englishman one less often finds 
this depression. One finds a heightened instinct, an 
orderly art, of self-preservation. By this I do not 
mean that the more prosperous are more selfish. 
We are all selfish, all except saints and fools. But 
prosperous selfishness is calculative, practical, com- 
promising. It is very pretty, of course, to think that 
your mild, impressible Irishman is a model of un- 
selfishness, that he is superior to mundane consid- 
erations. But marry one of them, and you'll see* 
In her memoirs Ellen Terry remarks that she likes 
the " hard woman." It is the same species of in- 
stinct that made Turgeniev love Bazarov, and that 
made George Meredith bestow Diana on the sober 
Englishman. Ellen Terry and Turgeniev and 
Meredith knew infantilism in themselves. They 
knew what it was to break their hearts crying for the 
moon. And when they found a decent human being 
who wasn't a lunatic, they made him a hero. 

The Bible of the Englishman is not Don Quix- 
ote. It is Robinson Crusoe. Robinson Crusoe 
is the epic of common sense. Most novels deal 
with the mating instinct. Here is the most suc- 
cessful of novels, and nothing mates in it except the 
edible. Food and shelter are its goals. It cele- 

[ 236 ] 



brates, from first to last, the instinct of self-preserva- 
tion. Its motto is Sinn Fein, self-help. It is a glori- 
ous record of the kind of individualism that never 
questions its own validity. Had Crusoe been 
brought up in the habit of self-distrust, he might eas- 
ily have died of self-pity, murmuring " it's the will o' 
God!" But while Crusoe was almost offensively 
pious, he had a most prodigious sense of his impor- 
tance. This was eminently clear when Friday came 
along. Crusoe annexed him without a shadow of 
doubt. It was instinctive imperialism. There was 
nothing democratic about it — no communism, no 
manhood suffrage, no liberty, equality and fraternity. 
It was up to Friday to make terms, but Crusoe had 
the advantage of knowing his own mind, and while he 
wanted Friday to trust him, he never felt inclined 
for one moment to adopt the amiable Irish euphem- 
ism, " I'll leave it to yourself." Odious results come 
from this habit of self-preference. Crusoe was on 
an island where there was no workhouse, no trade 
union, no employment agency. So he developed the 
unfortunate habit of Sinn Fein. 

THE PLIANT IRISH 

In Catholic Ireland, where the atmosphere is still 
somewhat feudal and aristocratic, Don Quixote is 
much more of a person than Robinson Crusoe. 
Chivalry is still the code, or the dream. As in Rus- 
sia or the Southern United States, material back- 
wardness is considered of less importance than 
" ideals," and a great deal of sarcastic wit plays about 
the gentleman who helps himself. In an aristocracy, 
of course, you belittle yourself if you help yourself. 
If you do a thing because you have to, you are one 

[ 237 ] 



of the common herd. If you do it without having 
to, you are a " gentleman." You can haul manure 
without degradation in Ireland, if only the country- 
people think you are well-off. But if it appears that 
you need money, then " he's the same as ourselves," 
a degradation almost unmentionable. 

Out of this pliant stuff a vigorous nationalism is 
not obviously made, and it was no wonder that the 
Irish unionists continually expected the farmers to go 
back on home rule. But this taint of ascendancy 
has usually proved itself superficial, and it acted as a 
positive irritant on middle-class Ireland. 

To understand Irish politics one must ignore the 
farmer for a moment and look to that epochal event 
in Irish history, the intermediate education act of 
1878. Up to 1878 the secondary education of 
Catholic boys and girls was in a poor way. The 
Christian Brothers' schools had solid worth, but they 
were primary, and the convents and polite board- 
ing schools cared for too few pupils. Up to 1908 
higher education for Catholics was practically non- 
existent. But the investment of £1,000,000 in 1878 
provided for a national system of annual exam- 
inations — the bread pudding of instruction being 
loaded with plums for the scholars and succulent re- 
sult-fees for the teachers. As a pedagogical system 
it was atrocious. The teachers treated the pupils as 
the New York poultry-dealers treat chickens, cram- 
ming them for weight with an adroit mixture of 
food and good ponderable sand. But there was a 
certain value in it. From 1878 on, six or seven 
thousand middle-class youths pushed farther out of 
illiteracy than ever before. Few decent careers 
opened for them, but they were the nucleus for the 
[238 ] 



later developments of nationalism — Sinn Fein and 
the Gaelic League. Anyone who examines the news- 
papers of that period will discover that Cork, Dub- 
lin, Limerick, Waterford, Kilkenny, Athlone, Gal- 
way, Ennis, Wexford, were feeding hot nationalism 
to a flood of romantic, eager youth. The land agi- 
tation, Parnellism, the Split, were landmarks to the 
graduates of the intermediate. It made no differ- 
ence that Irish history was sterilized by the inter- 
mediate board. It made no difference that Par- 
nell was anathema in many Catholic households after 
his downfall. In his Portrait of the Artist as a 
Young Man Mr. James Joyce has revealed how the 
nationalist schism was malignant even during Christ- 
mas dinners. But soon a new voice was in the 
land, the voice of Gaelic. Young Ireland re-discov- 
ered old Ireland. Dillon and Redmond were flog- 
ging the tired parliamentarian horse, but after Par- 
nellism the rest was silence. The play continued, 
but all Ireland had spoken with Horatio, " Now 
cracks a noble heart. Good night, sweet 
prince. . . ." The youth of Ireland flung itself into 
the Gaelic revival. 

THE REDMOND ERA 

This subtraction of young vitality from the poli- 
ticians misled intelligent Englishmen. " Home 
rule," mused Lord Ribblesdale in 1913, "has be- 
come a comparatively sober affair. To quote Lord 
Rosebery again, the Cerberus of Irish discontent 
has become a comparatively mild-mannered creature. 
Then another statement was that the age of romance 
seems over in Ireland. I think that exists now only 
in the excellent school of young Irish poets. No 

[ 239 ] 



greater contrast, I think, can be imagined than the 
contrast between such men as Swift and Flood and 
Grattan, O'Connell and Parnell, and the two Mr. 
Redmonds. The earlier men were cast in the heroic 
mould; the later in the municipal. I do not say they 
are the worse for that; indeed, to that extent they 
are much better to deal with." This is the cham- 
pagne of malice, but not quite so good a vintage 
as Lord Ribblesdale may have imagined. Mr. 
John Redmond was no more municipal than Camp- 
bell-Bannerman. Captain W. A. Redmond did not 
die municipally. And yet Lord Ribblesdale dis- 
cerned the reality. He saw that romance had as- 
cended to the poets. 

But before the poets, the parliamentarians. Mr. 
Redmond and his colleagues did make one fatal 
error after the Liberals resumed office in 1905. 
They completely failed to dramatize for Ireland 
the attack on the House of Lords. It was, in a 
definite sense, Ireland's campaign. If the Na- 
tionalists were over-numerous in the House of Com- 
mons they were as scarce as Hindus in the citadel 
of privilege. Popular Ireland had no more chance 
of converting the upper house than a Negro has of 
being senator from Alabama. This rigidity ended 
home rule. The moment the Commons joined issues 
with the Lords, Ireland's prospects brightened, and 
it was for the parliamentarians to dramatize this 
process. The task was beyond them. So long as 
Moses was parting the waves the chosen people kept 
excited. The long journey through the desert of 
constitutionalism was tedious. An occasional flurry 
of agrarian warfare relieved the tedium, but it re- 
quires miracles — burning bushes, rods eating up 
[ 240 ] 



other rods, dry passage between cliffs of water — to 
keep the promised land before exiles. And John 
Redmond had no genius for miracles. 

It would be wrong to underestimate John Red- 
mond. 1 He was, in a large sense, a man with style. 
He was the kind of a speaker who brought to 
public adddress something more than the weight of 
argument. He gave argument the weight of per- 
sonality. It was not an aroused and pungent per- 
sonality, it had none of the blue steel of Parnell, 
but it was serious and responsible, it had a peculiar 
depth of dignity. Only an Irishman, perhaps, who 
knew well what it was to listen to excruciating na- 
tional orators could entirely enjoy the grave and 
melodious utterance of John Redmond. He had a 
proud, imperious profile, the profile of a senator, and 
there was something lofty and senatorial in the pub- 
lic style he matured. He thought justly. He 
spoke fastidiously. He never condescended to 
slang or the platform humor which is the spiritual 
equivalent of slang, and he never came much nearer 
to comedy than sarcasm. Yet the organ-tone in 
which he spoke did not belie his seriousness, his mar- 
shalling intelligence, his fortified convictions, his for- 
midable honesty. The style truly became the char- 
acter. 

The great proof of Redmond's character was, of 
course, the leadership of the Irish parliamentary 
party since 1900. Those on the inside know what 
this leadership required, but any American may 
fairly surmise that the management of eighty na- 
tionalists in the British parliament was in no sense a 

1 The rest of this chapter previously appeared in the New 
Republic. 

[ 241 ] 



sinecure. Even eighty nationalists do not neces- 
sarily agree. The main body of nationalists had 
deposed their great captain Parnell just ten years 
before, and Redmond himself had led the passionate 
minority that took Gladstone as their Bismarck and 
Parnellism as their Alsace-Lorraine. Not until the 
Boer war was the futility of this division acknowl- 
edged and a reconciliation put through. There were 
centrifugal forces in the party even then, T. M. 
Healy and William O'Brien representing them, but 
it was not long before Healy and O'Brien were 
safely segregated and the rest of the party effectively 
organized. The interminable Liberal regime from 
1905 must have had a good deal to do with Red- 
mond's security. With the introduction of a new 
home rule bill he was indispensable. His party set- 
tled into the harness and he tooled them easily. But 
the very ease with which he was acknowledged 
" leader of the Irish race at home and abroad " dis- 
guised the realities of Irish political feeling, as dis- 
tinguished from those realities of which he was mas- 
ter, Irish party organization. 

It was the parti-educated youth that were signifi- 
cant, and Mr. Redmond's parliamentarians left them 
out in the cold. During the decade that followed the 
death of Parnell in 1891 the deadly internecine war- 
fare of Healyites and O'Brienites and Dillonites and 
Redmonites monopolized the parliamentarians' 
energy, and they sacrificed the young idea. The 
youth of Ireland received about the same inspiration 
from the Irish parliamentary party at that time that 
a young American received from the regular Repub- 
licans since 1908. Even less. But they had to go 
somewhere. They flowed away from politics, 

[ 242 ] 



flowed into the Gaelic language movement and the 
self-help movement, the latter covering everything 
from the passive resistance of early Sinn Fein to the 
self-help of the literary theatre and national letters 
and the nonpolitical self-help of agricultural co- 
operation and radical labor. All these activities 
seemed rather unimportant to the men at Westmin- 
ster. No member of parliament got it into his 
head that the energy of the nation was being se- 
riously diverted from constitutional interests. 

A fighting captain like Parnell would have ar- 
rested this. The clash of his steel would have 
stirred young Irish blood. But when John Redmond 
became leader of the united party the constitutional 
movement did not become a national inspiration for 
young Ireland. Redmond was the leader of a party, 
not the leader of a people. 

Redmond's limitation 
To put home rule on the statute books was no 
ignoble destiny for an Irish parliamentarian. It 
meant that he resisted every English attempt to sub- 
stitute a council for a parliament, had kept the party 
free from those obligations which are incurred 
through taking personal favors, had retained intact 
and unanimous the demand of the voters outside 
Orange Ulster for a measure of national self-govern- 
ment. Horace Plunkett was content with the Union 
at that time, and blandly minimized home rule. His 
position in this respect gave many nationalists an un- 
fortunate idea of the cooperative movement. Lord 
Dunraven and other rectified junkers tried hard to 
win the landlords to the people, and wanted the 
people to qualify their hopes for the sake of achiev- 

[ 243 ] 



ing this object. The northern Unionists remained 
adamant. In spite of these subversive and corrosive 
forces, Redmond held to his principle and drove 
ahead. The fact that home rule won, even on paper, 
was a gigantic parliamentary achievement. It meant 
that the liberalism of Englishmen had nominally 
triumphed, that an empire had recognized a na- 
tionalism, that a victim of might had received a 
measure of formal restitution. 

But it was only on paper, and there Redmond had 
failed. A man of legal mind, he had been content 
to throw the onus of carrying home rule on the 
British government. He had left the sources of 
popular opinion to take care of themselves. In this 
he proved himself the parliamentarian as against 
the popular leader, the man of an established order 
as against the creator, the man of decrees as against 
the man of positive will. 

REDMOND AND PARNELL 

This was the difference between Redmond and Par- 
nell. Parnell knew that his whole strength lay in 
focussing the will of Ireland, and he organized that 
will at the source. When he spoke to England, Ire- 
land spoke to England, and when England rejected 
him, England rejected a whole people. At times 
Parnell was guilty of neglecting his duty, and at 
times he treated his party like dogs. But what held 
the party together was a leadership that had the 
people back of it, that estimated with ruthless clarity 
the sovereign rights of the people and asserted those 
rights regardless of every solemn and sacred British 
pretension. What had Parnell to fear from Eng- 

[ 244 ] 



land? He knew the moral pretensions of the Brit- 
ish empire as well as any one, but he had an eye 
for facts, he saw perfectly clearly the wretched 
state of the Irish people, the economic impossibility 
of landlordism, the fatuity of governing Ireland from 
Westminster, the unutilized solidarity of Ireland. 
He handled Ireland like a wheelwright, found the 
hub for it, fitted the spokes of it, hooped it with dur- 
able iron. He judged the moral hospitality of Glad- 
stone as a general would judge terrain. The estab- 
lished British order meant nothing to him. He 
strove to get Ireland back of him, and then he was 
able to talk constitutionality to the British House of 
Commons. 

With this characteristic, Ulster could never have 
deterred Parnell. Parnell had known Sir Edward 
Carson from the time he was a member of the 
National Liberal Club. He had known him when he 
began to " devil " for " Peter the Packer " and hunt 
the tenant hare with the Castle hounds. There is no 
doubt in my mind that long before Sir Edward Car- 
son got his rifles from Germany Parnell would have 
carried the war into Orange Ulster. Parnell would 
have gone through Edward Carson as steel goes 
through paper. He would have grappled with the 
real Orangeman where he lives. The fate of Ire- 
land would not have been left to meddlesome 
duchesses, retired army colonels, junkers in the de- 
feated House of Lords, political climbers like F. E. 
Smith, who happened to be in the opposition, the " to- 
hell-with-the-pope " idealists, the Belfast chamber of 
commerce. The people of Ireland would have been 
made completely and dangerously alive to their 

[ 245 ] 



liberties during those years that Sir Edward Carson 
was playing the game of British toryism and North- 
cliffe irresponsibility in Ireland. It was not for noth- 
ing that Parnell had studied Ulster in the days of 
Randolph Churchill. He was fair to Ulster and re- 
spected it, but the guns were not made that could 
have entered Ulster with immunity in Parnell's reign. 
Parnell knew warfare when he saw it. And there 
would have been an answer to the Ulster banks in 
the south of Ireland, to the Ulster manufacturer and 
the British manufacturer, which liberal England and 
unionist Ireland would equally clearly have under- 
stood. 

Had John Redmond given a full and free channel 
to Irish popular will, he might have seen home rule 
established before he died, and fathered the first 
home rule parliament. The real reason for lament- 
ing this failure is the subsequent diffusion of Irish 
purpose. Rebellion is sometimes an attractive es- 
cape from life, but Parnell understood that the best 
place to utilize the rebellious impulse was inside the 
British constitution, and nothing but his downfall 
would have driven young Irishmen to Sinn Fein. It 
is the tragedy of John Redmond's career that he al- 
lowed constitutionalism to impose on him, to dictate 
his method, to hamper his will. He was, for an 
Irish leader, prematurely conservative. A man of 
courage and faith and rectitude, he made the one 
mistake of an agitator. He accepted the established 
code before the order which he strove for was es- 
tablished. 

Before John Redmond died he knew the deepest 
bitterness a moderate man can know, the bitterness 
of having his restraint taken as weakness and his 

[ 246] 



concessions manipulated. This in itself warned 
Irishmen to beware of restraint and concessions. It 
pointed to extremes. 



[ 247 ] 



IX 

THE INSURRECTION IN 1916 

THE " OLD STOCK " 

IN the year 19 12 nearly half a million Irishmen 
signed a pledge to stand together in opposing home 
rule. " Signing the pledge " is not keeping the 
pledge, but when 471,414 human beings affirm a po- 
litical conviction, it establishes that conviction as 
politically important. In the supercilious language 
of Mr. Balfour, in another connection, " statesmen 
must act as if the dream were fact." 

Ulster, of course, was the backbone of this cov- 
enant, but outside Ulster, as Sir Reginald Pole- 
Carew and the Earl of Wicklow have indicated, 
there has always been a minority to support the 
Ulstermen. The sentiment of this minority after 
19 1 2 is worth recalling. 

First, because of its charming simplicity, let me 
quote the view of an American girl who returned to 
her own country in 19 13 from five weeks' hunting in 
the County Cork. " Nobody seems to want home 
rule in the south of Ireland," said this lady, " but if 
Ulster fights, my hunting friends in the south will 
join Ulster. They say they don't want to be stabbed 
in their beds." 

No normal person wants to be stabbed in, or even 
out of, his bed. To avoid such an unpleasantness, 
[ 248 ] 



one might easily elect to fight for Ulster against 
home rule. But the sporting gentry that the Amer- 
ican had been visiting have never as a class wanted 
home rule. It annoys them. It offends their sense 
of values. It runs counter to their aptitudes and 
their taste. They cannot imagine that anyone could 
seriously desire an innovation so risky, so provin- 
cial and so plebeian. Moreover, they chat with 
" friends " of theirs among the farmers, and they 
quite easily conclude that the farmers are politically 
satiated and content. For personal charm, these 
Anglo-Irish are inestimable. Politically, they are 
infantile. When they came together at the Dublin 
horse show and at Punchestown races during this pe- 
riod, they settled their scores with the Liberal gov- 
ernment by receiving the Liberal lord lieutenant in 
stony silence. They cut him ! This dreadful appli- 
cation of the boycott had been maintained for years. 
When the horse-worshippers went home, they forgot 
politics until Ulster asked for sympathy. Then a 
few hundred of them would motor in to some Castle 
ballroom, and behind closed doors pass stern reso- 
lutions against home rule. The only hitch to such 
proceedings would possibly be the refusal of the local 
nationalist brewery to lend the Marquis the barrels 
for his unionist platform, Sharman Crawford's brew- 
ery and Captain Craig's distillery being too far 
away for this service. But the hitch would never be 
fatal. The rival nationalist brewery would prove 
obliging and lend his lordship the necessary barrels. 
So long as it has had one penny to put on another, 
the Irish country house has subsisted on fox, grouse, 
partridge, bridge, golf and horse. Apart from its 
duties as magistrate and squire, and its connection 

[ 249 ] 



with the army and the services and the House of 
Lords, it has had no centrifugal impulses. When 
one of the County learned that her friend Lady 
Gregory had turned to writing comedies, for exam- 
ple, she revealed her class's large comprehension of 
the exigencies of life by sympathetically remarking: 
" She's gettin' too old to hunt, isn't she?" Some- 
times beloved by the people and nearly always amic- 
ably received, this section of the unionist aristocracy 
has remained astonishingly separate, aloof, sinfully 
trivial and emptily superior. George Russell has 
delivered the just verdict on them. " They as a 
class, though not all of them, were scornful or neg- 
lectful of the workers in the industry by which they 
profited, and to many who knew them in their pride 
of place, and thought them all-powerful, they are 
already becoming a memory, the good disappearing 
together with the bad." 

THE SERIOUS UNIONIST 
Passing over the horse-worshippers, there comes 
the more serious Unionist attitude. This may be 
put down as concerned imperialism, in the good and 
the bad sense. The reactionary imperialist pre- 
serves a feudal view of the Irish caitiff. Observing 
Irish debility, he ascribes it to the inherent defects of 
the papist, his ignorance, indolence and poverty. 
To be put on a level with a people so poor, ignorant 
and indolent (or, as it is usually expressed, to be 
" placed under the heel of a parliament in Dublin ") 
seems to this urbane gentleman an injustice too deep 
and obvious for discussion. In addition, he believes 
that the Irish nationalist does not appreciate the em- 
pire, and that, therefore, the only way to deal with 

[ 250 ] 



him is patiently to continue remedial government 
from Westminster and, with this degree of responsi- 
bility, let him master his native defects. Moreover, 
this unionist genuinely discounts any hope of good 
government on representative principles from a peo- 
ple so patently loyal to the Roman Catholic church. 
The progressive element among unionists is much 
nearer to home rule. At the head of this group have 
been landlords and business men with their fortunes 
willingly staked in the country. The spokesmen 
have been persons of public spirit like Sir Horace 
Plunkett and Lord Dunraven. Sir Horace Plunkett 
deserves extremely well of Ireland. Before the col- 
lapse of Parnellism, he developed his cooperative 
programme for farmers, and later on during the 
Unionist regime, he got Catholic and Protestant to- 
gether on the recess committee, out of which splen- 
did creative conference came the department of agri- 
culture. With George Russell to interpret the move- 
ment and penetrate it with his literary genius, co- 
operation has proved a genuine though rather limited 
success. It has been handicapped by two things, — 
the middleman and trader antagonism of the Nation- 
alist members of parliament and Sir Horace Plun- 
kett's own political creed. This creed was enunci- 
ated in a thoroughly well-meaning book, Ireland in 
the New Century. In this book, dedicated to the 
memory of the Unionist, W. E. H. Lecky, the au- 
thor iterated his " continued opposition to home 
rule." He pressed hard the conviction that " if the 
material conditions of the great body of our coun- 
trymen were advanced, if they were encouraged in 
industrial enterprises, and were provided with prac- 
tical education in proportion to their natural intelli- 

[ 251 ] 



gence, they would see that a political development on 
lines similar to those adopted in England, was, con- 
sidering the necessary relations between the two 
countries, best for Ireland, and then they would 
cease to desire what is ordinarily understood as home 
rule." This conviction was accompanied by much 
criticism of the parliamentarians and the Catholic 
church and a free assertion of the moral timidity of 
Irish character and the weakness of Irish fibre, with 
many mugwumpish strictures such as " in the main," 
" within certain limits," " if not always with," " not 
in any marked degree," " if, however, in some 
cases." 

Sir Horace assured his readers of the Irish Na- 
tionalist politicians' " want of political and economic 
foresight." " The influence of the Irish political 
leaders has neither advanced the nation's march 
through the wilderness nor taught the people how to 
dispense with manna from above when they reach 
the Promised Land." He contrasted the Irish un- 
favorably with the Scotch-Irish, lamented the reputa- 
tion of the Irish in America, pointed out the number 
of Catholic Irish girls who became prostitutes in 
America, said that at home the Catholic Irish were 
" apathetic, thriftless, and almost non-industrial, and 
that they especially require the exercise of strength- 
ening influence on their moral fibre." " The home 
of the strictly civic virtues and efficiencies is in Prot- 
estant Ireland." " In the last analysis the problem 
of Irish ineffectiveness at home is in the main a prob- 
lem of character — and of Irish character." 

Sir Horace Plunkett's attitude seems irreproach- 
able to the good imperialist. To the nationalist it 
recalls the ancient ditty, 

[ 252 ] 



Perhaps it was right to dissemble your love, 
But — why did you kick me down stairs? 

The moral cowards and spineless jellyfish did not 
cotton to Sir Horace's book. John Redmond, who 
had sat on the recess committee, declared his own 
feelings. " I myself, indeed, at one time, enter- 
tained some belief in the good intentions of Sir 
Horace Plunkett and his friends, but recent events 
have entirely undeceived me; and Sir Horace Plun- 
kett's recent book, full as it is of undisguised con- 
tempt for the Irish race, makes it plain to me that 
the real object of the movement in question is to 
undermine the National Party and divert the minds 
of our people from home rule, which is the only 
thing which can ever lead to a real revival of Irish 
industries." This was an extremely natural conclu- 
sion on the part of a political leader, considering Sir 
Horace's hope that his own movement would lead 
Irishmen " to cease to desire what is ordinarily un- 
derstood by home rule." But the notion that Sir 
Horace Plunkett was " insidious " betrayed a certain 
animus. 

A more thoroughly unfortunate book than Sir 
Horace's could hardly be imagined. It seriously 
misunderstood the Parnell movement. It showed a 
shocking tepidity about Irish history. With the best 
intention in the world it took exactly the wrong tone, 
the jarring pedagogic tone. When you have finally 
succeeded in impressing on a man that his moral fibre 
is weak and that his character is feeble, what have 
you done toward personal rehabilitation? You 
have convinced him that he does not possess within 
himself the necessary autonomic gift, that he has no 

[ 253 ] 



spiritual capital, that every failure is a proof of in- 
herent deficiency, that nothing can possibly cure such 
deficiency, and that each failure is a sign that effort 
must always be unavailing in the case of a material 
so shoddy. Of course, Sir Horace had no desire to 
criticize destructively but that was his effect. To 
call him " insidious " on such evidence is to call a 
sledge-hammer insidious. The trouble was, Sir 
Horace Plunkett employed this sledge-hammer for 
trepanning a head full of nationalism, and was then 
blandly astonished at parliamentarian fury. But 
whatever criticism there was to be made of Sir Hor- 
ace Plunkett, no one could deny that he saw Ireland 
as a unit and that, when he interpreted his country 
abroad, he declared " unbounded faith in the latent 
capacities " of his countrymen. 

THE ULSTER BRAND 

Quite different from this was the Dublin lawyer, 
Sir Edward Carson. The clue to Sir Edward Car- 
son is not stern northern Calvinism. He is a south- 
ern Unionist. The clue to him is British as well as 
Irish. It is his identification with the frustrated 
Tories of the House of Lords as well as with Belfast 
business men. But the home rule situation requires 
above everything an understanding of the facts about 
Belfast. 

To judge Belfast fairly, one must have perfectly 
clear standards. Belfast is a typical capitalistic 
community. Its success or failure must be measured 
accordingly. Being entirely different from a city 
like Dublin, a direct comparison is fatuous. One is 
the home of productivity, the other largely a dis- 
tributive agent. But the fact that Dublin obviously 
[ 254 1 



cannot live by distribution does not add a cubit to 
Belfast's stature. The vices of Belfast cannot en- 
hance Dublin, neither can the foulness of Dublin 
give Belfast glory. The vice of sectionalism is the 
vice of all jealousy — we resent our rival's virtue as 
an indictment of our own inadequacy. We fear, 
and therefore advert to, competition. The point 
about Belfast is this: it is, for reasons not under 
discussion, an industrial community. Dublin and 
Belfast symbolize the two entirely different problems 
that confront Irish economists — Belfast, boasting 
of its wealth, still offers a typical case of " the inhu- 
manity and waste of modern industry." Dublin, on 
the contrary, is pre-capitalistic, presenting industry 
in the haphazard and unorganized form, — an eco- 
nomic anomaly. Its inhumanity and waste are not 
so deliberate as Belfast's, but they are fifty times as 
inevitable. In the one case, a practical instrument is 
used badly. In another case, an impracticable in- 
strument is used badly. The evils of Belfast are 
like the choking of a canal through carelessness. 
The evils of Dublin like the silting of a meandering 
river. To correct the evils of Dublin involves not 
merely clearing the silt, but making the river a canal. 
Belfast has already canalized. 

Like all wealthy communities that are called 
" young " because they have risen rapidly to power, 
Belfast is intensely human in its local pride — the 
Chicago of Ireland, it attributes its eminence to its 
own native virtue. It surpasses Dublin as Chicago 
surpasses New Orleans, and it revels in comparison. 
" Belfast has no natural advantages. It was 
founded on a mud swamp. It had no deep broad 
river. The Lough was open to every storm and 

[ 255 ] 



was too shallow for large ships to approach the city. 
Yet despite all these disadvantages, it has become 
the largest, most industrious and wealthiest city in 
Ireland. Why?" 

who's who in ulster 

Proud of its size, its valuation, its shipyards, its 
Tobacco King, its municipal hospitals, its municipal 
gas, Belfast reproduces the exact idiom of Chicago. 
It tells you that it has " the largest ropeworks in 
the world." It tells you it has " the largest dis- 
tillery in the world." Like a schoolboy with biceps, 
it exhibits itself for the awe and admiration of all. 
Mr. Thomas Sinclair, an Ulster leader, speaks of 
Ulster energy, enterprise and industry. The Mar- 
quis of Londonderry speaks of the energy, applica- 
tion, clearheadedness and hard work that have given 
Belfast its proud position in the industrial and ship- 
ping world. And admiration it exacts from the im- 
partial. " The city of his idolatry," says Mr. 
Sydney Brooks, " is unquestionably the emblem of 
a magnificent conquest over inconceivable odds. 
The splendid energy, fearlessness, force and tenacity 
which have made Belfast what it is, a city of in- 
exhaustible industrial marvels, are qualities not to be 
gainsaid. Perhaps nowhere in the world do 350,- 
000 people produce so much wealth as in Belfast. 
Their shipyards and linen-mills, their tobacco fac- 
tories and distilleries, their printing-works and rope 
factories, make up a great and indisputable record 
of industrial achievement." 

With such achievement to its credit, with the firm- 
ness and self-reliance that achievement breeds, 
elderly Belfast resents with hatred and scorn the 
[ 256 ] 



thought of association with what it considers lazy, 
slatterny, dreamy southern Ireland. It does not 
actually know the south of Ireland, of course. In 
July, 1907, for example, the Great Northern rail- 
way booked 42 passengers from all its stations to 
Cork and Killarney, in the height of the tourist sea- 
son. Nor does elderly Belfast dwell on the fact 
that the rateable value of Belfast was only £1,599,- 
603, as against £1,136,969 for Dublin; and that 
Dublin with its suburbs has practically the same 
population and precisely the same rateable value. 
These haughty competitive statistics never conde- 
scend to all the humble facts. 

Nor when Belfast boasts of " its energy, fear- 
lessness, force and tenacity " does it take pains to 
add that cheap labor is its principal asset, with all 
the consequent evils. In giving evidence before the 
committee on Irish finance, Mr. J. Milne Barbour, 
whose mills employ about 1,500 men and 3,000 
women, maintained that the standard of living has 
been raised in Belfast. " I can remember very well 
seeing the workpeople going with bare feet and bare 
legs to and from their work; it is the exception to 
see that now." But when he was asked about the 
insurance bill he made a significant admission: " I 
think the weekly levy is going to be very heavy, 
and it is going to hit Belfast especially hard, be- 
cause the rate of wages ruling in Belfast is low and, 
consequently, the employers' contribution will be 
higher there probably than in England." Mr. Bar- 
bour, of course, was opposed to home rule. He 
could not help believing it might disturb the feeling 
of confidence of the London financial houses. " In 
the North of Ireland we are dependent very largely 

[ 257 ] 



on London for our credits." The London financial 
houses are against home rule. 

These large facts as to labor in Belfast are a 
matter of government record. Of the 71,161 per- 
sons in the linen and hemp industry, the average an- 
nual wage was thirty pounds. The net output was 
sixty-one pounds per person employed. And the 
flax, of course, no longer came mainly from Ulster 
farmers. Before the war, 80% of it was imported 
from Russia and Belgium. St. John Ervine, " a na- 
tive of Belfast and a member of a Protestant family, 
the majority of whom either were or are connected 
with the Orange institution," pointed out some years 
ago that " it has been established beyond doubt by 
a government committee of inquiry that there is an 
enormous amount of sweated labor in Belfast. . . . 
The hours of labor in Belfast mills are, as a rule, 
from 6 .-30 a. m. to 6 p. m. The bulk of the women 
working in these mills are permanently unhealthy. 
They suffer from anasmia, debility, and ulcerated 
stomachs. ... I may add that the conditions of em- 
ployment make health absolutely impossible for these 
women." 

Still " the whole of Babylon, the kirk malignant " 
is always a good battle-cry in Belfast, where quarter 
of the population is the underselling labor of 
Catholics. And when the parliament act took away 
the last barricade of the Unionists against home 
rule, the House of Lords naturally adjourned to 
Ulster to raise troops. These, not the Nationalist 
Irish, were Germany's primary allies in the British 
Isles. Cannon, machine guns and rifles were 
shipped to Ireland. Every possible descendant of 
the implanted settlers of Ireland was rallied. 
[ 258 ] 



Large numbers were openly recruited and armed. 
The Ulster leaders pleaded they were loyal but they 
insisted that the Liberals of England did not and 
could not speak for the empire. They were just 
like the Nationalists in so far as the only English 
authority they recognized was an authority like- 
minded to themselves. Lord Northcliffe joined 
with Lord Londonderry and Lord Abercorn and 
Lord Willoughby de Broke and Lord Roberts and 
Sir Edward Carson and Bonar Law and F. E. Smith 
to advise and stimulate rebellion. Some British 
generals in the regular army, to the delight of Ger- 
many, were definitely available as leaders. A pro- 
visional government, with Carson as its premier, 
was arranged for in 191 1. The Unionist and 
Orange organizations pledged themselves that under 
no conditions would they acknowledge a home rule 
government or obey its decrees. In 19 12 the 
Solemn Covenanters pledged themselves " to refuse 
to recognize its authority." Later on, £1,000,000 
was raised for ambulance and army insurance. 
During this period the government shifted from one 
foot to the other, but took no action. There were 
no nationalists under arms. 

THE SOLEMN COVENANT 

I have examined with great interest the figures 
published by Sir Edward Carson in connection with 
the Solemn League and Covenant. In Ulster alone, 
according to Sir Edward, 447,205 men and women 
signed this earnest pledge. The enrollment began 
in September, 19 12, and the figures were issued in 

19*3- 

Scattered over the nine counties in Ulster, there 

[ 259 ] 



are 840,000 Presbyterians, Episcopalians and 
Methodists. It is fair to assume that it was from 
these, and not from the Catholics, that the Solemn 
League and Covenanters were recruited. But not 
all of this number was eligible to sign. One may 
assume that Sir Edward excluded the senile and in- 
fantile. Taking, then, every single male and female 
between 17 and 70 years in Protestant Ulster, we 
find a total of 525,065 persons. Out of this total, 
according to Sir Edward, 447,204 signed the Solemn 
League and Covenant. 

Without subtracting a single criminal, illiterate, 
lunatic, invalid or Protestant Liberal, you find that 
90% of the Protestant males between 17 and 70 
pledges themselves to " use all means " to defeat 
home rule, and 80% of the women associated them- 
selves with the men. 

I do not suppose that in the history of the world 
such a claim as this has ever been made before. 
I do not suppose that mice would petition against 
cats in such proportion. At the last general election 
in Ulster there were at least four counties where 
20% of the rural Unionists did not go to the polls, 
yet this Solemn League and Covenant reached four 
times as many persons as the total enfranchised 
Unionist vote. I hope the document will be one day 
enshrined in the British Museum — with a note to 
the astounding effect that out of 447,204 alleged 
Covenanters, less than 10% (about 40,000) volun- 
teered up to 19 16 to save the empire which they so 
passionately loved in times of peace. This fact 
shows that the loyalties of Ulster were organized 
not for the empire at all but for a strictly local 
prejudice. 

[ 260 ] 



The conviction which this particular pledge af- 
firmed is that home rule would prove financially dis- 
astrous, religiously subversive, civilly destructive 
and imperially perilous for Ulstermen. It was a 
serious belief and I think it would be wrong to be- 
little it. A profound conviction abides in Presby- 
terian Ulster and the men of Presbyterian Ulster 
gave it a body and a voice. They proved to the 
world that they have a will of their own, that they 
know their own will, and that they will always 
take good care to make the world know it. Organ- 
ized will is an immense power in constitutional 
countries. Ulster possessed a definitely organized 
will. Its cool disregard of restrictions as to arms 
drew a parallel between themselves and the previous 
revolutionist of the South. In a world of hard 
facts, the Ulstermen proved that they knew how 
many beans make five. 

" Success confers every right in this enlightened 
age ; wherein for the first time, it has come to be 
admitted and proclaimed in set terms, that Success 
is Right, and Defeat is Wrong." So said the 
preface of the Jail Journal. But John Mitchel 
would have given ten more years as a convict to have 
carried treasonable intimidation to the lengths that 
Belfast went since 19 12. An Ulsterman himself, 
he would have admired the skill with which Ulster 
imposed on flabby Liberalism. 

The home rule bill comprises, among other 
things, a symposium of reassurance to Ulster. It 
chains Ireland up to the noblest principles of civic 
and religious freedom, Imperial supremacy and fiscal 
impotence. " Not worth the paper they are written 
on," growls Ulster. It believes the morals of Eng- 

[ 261 ] 



lish Liberals to be the morals of Bethmann-Hollweg. 

There is a good deal of nonsense in the Solemn 
Covenant. This was not important to the angry 
and humorless men who signed it, nor does the 
precise language of any pledge repay a purist's 
scrutiny. A Solemn Covenant is underwritten in 
the same trusting spirit as an express contract or a 
lease. We sign it if it suits our necessity. But, 
while it is an acceptable instrument of organized 
will, it may well be examined for what Mr. Graham 
Wallas calls " organized thought." As organized 
thought it reveals an astonishing degree of irrever- 
ence and dishonesty. It pretends that God is closely 
identified with the Belfast Chamber of Commerce. 
It says nothing about its business judgment as to the 
inadvisability of home rule, but is convinced " in 
conscience " that it will be disastrous to the well- 
being of Ulster. Under all the flummery, however, 
there is a genuine determination and it is with this, 
not with " the sure confidence that God will defend 
the right," that the democratic Irishman is con- 
cerned. 

The essence of the determination is that the 
native Irish be given no chance to retaliate on Ulster. 
The minority of Ulstermen — St. John Ervine and 
Robert Lynd testify for them — repudiate that fear. 
Speaking in London in 19 12, an Ulsterman, Canon 
A. L. Lilley, pointed out that there was no practical 
reason for retaliation. He said to his fellow 
Ulstermen: "You know that in all these counties 
the Protestants and Catholics live side by side with 
one another; that, except in the towns, and especially 
in the city of Belfast, there is no segregation of the 
members of the rival religious communities in 
[ 262 ] 



separate districts. And you know, too, that, with 
the same exception, they are all alike members of 
the same social class, and engaged in the same in- 
dustries. ... I think I have shown that the oppor- 
tunities for indirect pressure upon a discrimination 
against the Protestant population of Ulster are so 
remote that the fears grounded upon their supposed 
existence may be described as in the last degree 
chimerical. . . . The truth is that Ulster is hag- 
ridden by the prejudices of a bygone time. It does 
not quite realize that we are living in the twentieth 
century. It lives with the prejudices and self-sug- 
gested fears derived from the sixteenth and seven- 
teenth centuries and the wars of religion. The 
greatest blessing to which we can look forward in 
a self-governing Ireland is that those fears will be 
finally allayed and those prejudices finally eradicated 
by the mutual understanding and tolerance which 
only the partnership of all in the work of National 
regeneration is at all likely to procure." For all 
Canon Lilley, the fear was and is potent, and it is 
Sir Edward Carson's stock-in-trade. 

" Ulster," says Sir Edward, " sees in Irish nation- 
alism a dark conspiracy, buttressed upon crime and 
inciting to outrage, maintained by ignorance and 
pandering to superstitution." 

REBELLION IN ULSTER 

The solid backing behind the Solemn League and 
Covenant, however, was the junker and unionist 
high command of the British army. In March, 
19 14, came the crisis. The London Times sent a 
correspondent to Ulster. " In almost every house 
which the writer visited he found rifles and pistols." 

[ 263 ] 



" The proclamation which forbids the importation 
of arms," he said, " is considered in Ulster to be 
ultra vires and its legality will be shortly tested 
in the courts." The importation of arms from Ger- 
many and Italy had gone on unimpeded by the gov- 
ernment. On March 20, 19 14, Sir Edward Carson, 
made a speech in England before departing for 
Ulster. Mr. Churchill, he declared, " has told 
us that the government have said their last word in 
the offers they have made, and he was backed up by 
that superb member from West Belfast [Mr. 
Devlin], at his Sunday meeting. We have it now 
from the prime minister that this is the last word. 
Very well, if it is the last word, then I tell him to 
read the first lord's speech in which he said that 
I and others were guilty of treasonable conspiracy, 
and let them come and try conclusions with us. The 
government have been up to this time on this ques- 
tion a government of cowards. They have not had 
the courage to deal with what the first lord of the 
admiralty now says was a treasonable conspiracy. 
What right had they to let it go on for two years? " 
On March 25, 19 14, it was reported in the 
London Times that General Gough, in the presence 
of Lord Roberts, had confronted General French 
with a written guarantee engaging that the troops 
of the Irish command should not be used against 
Ulster. General French, the report said, signed 
this guarantee. Twelve days before, on March 13, 
at the Ritz Hotel, a dinner of a hundred Unionists 
greeted Sir Edward, and he was given an inscribed 
sword. The sword, an infantry fighting sword, 
said, " Presented to Edward Carson by friends of 
Ulster in sure confidence that God will defend 

[264] 



the right." God, Sir Edward and the Ritz! 

In Belfast Sir Edward Carson was met by a regi- 
ment of volunteers. On March 21, the volunteers 
were reported to be mobilized. 

In spite of this defiance the government refused 
to abandon the home rule measure and in April, 
19 14, Mr. Asquith promised to vindicate the law. 
The government actually started troops to Ulster. 
Then opposition intensified. Mr. Balfour inveighed 
against the proposal to use troops. The army con- 
sulted with Carson. Generals French and Ewart 
resigned. 

About this period, with Mr. Asquith and Mr. 
Birrell failing to put England's pledges to the proof, 
the National Volunteers in the south were being 
organized at last. Mr. Asquith temporized further. 
At his behest John Redmond peremptorily assumed 
control of the Volunteers. Their selected leader 
was Professor MacNeill, a foremost spirit in the 
non-political Gaelic revival. There was formal 
harmony until the European war was declared, when 
Mr. Redmond sought to utilize the National 
Volunteers for recruiting. This move made definite 
the purely national purposes of the Irish Volunteers. 

Four events occurred in rapid succession to de- 
stroy the Irish Volunteers' confidence in English 
authority. These were decisive events and yet 
events over which the Irish Volunteers could have 
no control. 

On July 10th, 19 14, armed Ulster Volunteers 
marched through Belfast and Sir Edward Carson 
held the first meeting of his provisional government. 

On July 26th, 19 14, the British troops killed 
three persons and wounded sixty persons because 

[ 265 ] 



rowdies had thrown stones at them in Dublin, subse- 
quent to their futile attempt to intercept the land- 
ing of Irish Volunteer arms, from a ship at Howth. 

On September 19, 19 14, the home rule bill was 
signed, but its operation indefinitely suspended. 

In May, 19 15, Sir Edward Carson became a 
member of the British cabinet. 

The two flagrant events in this list of four were 
Sir Edward Carson's appointment to the cabinet, 
in sheer contempt of nationalist Ireland, and the 
slaughter of Dublin citizens by British soldiers. 
The radical Irish papers had seen British soldiers 
kill Dublin citizens on the eve of the world war, 
and they did not conceal their passionate anger. 
" So ends the story," said the weekly paper Sinn 
Fein after the inquest. " Three of the unarmed 
mere Irish were shot dead in cold blood and no- 
body is going to suffer for it." " The victims of 
Sunday's massacre," said An Claidheamh Soluis, 
" were murdered because they dared to express their 
anger and indignation at the action of the regi- 
ment known as the King's Own Scottish Borderers 
in attempting to disarm the Volunteers. The armed 
cowards who fled before the stand of the Dublin 
Volunteers at Clontarf, shot down the unarmed 
crowd in their panic-stricken retreat through the 
city. ... In November last, when Eoin MacNeill 
and Padraic MacPiarais [Pearse] advocated in An 
iClaidheamh the arming of Irishmen, some timid 
friends rebuked us for voicing a policy of ' blood 
and thunder.' Today the right to bear arms has 
been won, and Ireland is not only a nation, but she 
counts as a nation in the councils of Europe." " Let 

[ 266 ] 



the 26th of July be noted in the Calendar of the 
Irish Nation," said Irish Freedom, " for on that 
day the Volunteer Movement was formally and ef- 
fectively baptized, baptized in the blood of the 
Volunteers — blood also of British Soldiery. For 
the first time since Fenianism . . ." and so on. " It 
is a great thing and a heartening thing, to bring the 
arms safe into Dublin City. The thought of arms 
and the touch of arms have made Ireland into the 
thing we dreamed of. And the dawn is very near 
now." 

REBELLION IN LEINSTER 

Yet the Insurrection of 19 16 came as incredible 
to most Irishmen. Clear though these warnings 
that heralded it, widespread though the arrests that 
followed it, and drastic the overhauling of Irish 
homes from coast to coast, it was a sharp surprise 
to the majority of the inhabitants. It was too much 
out of their ordinary calculations to seem believable. 
Its sources, concealed from the general run of ob- 
servers, were sufficiently remote to have appeared 
unimportant to persons so well acquainted with Irish 
sentiment as Mr. Redmond, or so well acquainted 
with official reports as Mr. Birrell. That there 
could be so much resolute spirit in Dublin, that there 
was such energy to liberate in physical flame and 
spiritual incandescence, was a mystery to others 
than the authorities. There was ample excuse for 
any man to disbelieve that a rebellion could actually 
happen. If the fact of insurrection were not patent, 
men might still look over anaemic Ireland and pro- 
claim it impossible. If you had said it was im- 

[ 267 ] 



possible early in 19 1 6 there would have been Irish- 
men everywhere, all of them calling themselves 
Nationalists, to agree. 

Calling a rebellion a " riot " is one way to soothe 
people's nerves. Immediately after the outbreak 
in 19 16 there was an attempt to minimize it. This 
came from the simple human impulse to subdue 
facts to one's own designs. Men in parliament like 
John Redmond and Mr. Asquith and Mr. Birrell 
who had worked hard to preserve the Irish pro- 
gramme still worked hard to preserve Irish appear- 
ances. Those appearances, however, could not be 
saved by words. They were shot to pieces in the 
streets of Dublin. It was convenient at the time 
to speak of " rioters," to compare the Dublin insur- 
rection to the Sidney street scuffle. But men who 
scuffle with authority do not bring the bloodiest of 
vengeance on their heads. It was not the action of 
the Irish rebels that sealed their seriousness but 
the action of the British and Irish authorities. 
Rioters do not drive a great and stable government 
to extreme measures. The exigent killing of a score 
of Irish leaders, the deportation of hundreds of 
citizens from far and near, the thrusting of law 
into the hands of the military, conclusively affirmed 
whether the outbreak was a rebellion or a riot. To 
call it anything but a rebellion is to attempt a tedious 
lie. 

The leaders of the rebellion, it was said, were 
not substantial nor representative men and their 
followers were plainly " dupes." On a point such 
as this it is hard to be fair. It is seldom likely that 
men who conspire against an established government 
will have previously, under that established govern- 
£ 268 ] 



ment, become eminent in estate or repute. The 
history of Russian revolutions illustrates this truism. 
These particular rebels were not well-off. Aside 
from this, however, they were men of reputation 
in their city. They were not rabble-leaders or mem- 
bers of a rabble themselves. The loss of civilian 
life caused intense bitterness and it was freely de- 
clared that the first occupation of the rebels was 
the callous slaughter of unarmed British soldiers 
who happened to be on furlough in Dublin. 
This, it was confidentially reported to the United 
States, was the real crime of the leaders and the real 
reason they were executed. This was empty slander. 
The street-fighting made pitiful and irreparable 
mistakes. So did the attempt to suppress it. The 
fact remains that the rebellion was not the work of 
a mob and had strangely few incidents of outrage. 
The mistakes on the rebel side might have been 
more insisted upon, however, but for the killing of 
three unarmed and guiltless journalists at the com- 
mand of an officer. With a cynical disregard of 
justice and international honor this man was set free 
after a few months' confinement as a " lunatic." 
No case so clear as his was ever brought forward 
against the rebels. 

In one sense, the rebellion was not national. It 
did not engage the bourgeois political organizations. 
It did not enlist the multitude of the farmers. It 
enrolled at best a small numerical proportion of 
the people. At the height of it the country was 
neither aflame nor paralyzed. It was still eating its 
regular meals and holding its fairs and milking its 
cows. The rebellion did not halt the streams or 
disturb the ploughboy's sleep. But in another sense 

[ 269 ] 



it was vitally national. It was national in its genesis 
and its object. It had more than physical signifi- 
cance. It sprang from deep and wide convictions. 
It replenished those convictions in countless hearts 
with many living sacrifices. By their collision with 
the British government the rebels put one concep- 
tion of nationalism to the test, and renewed every 
other conception of it. It is with the irrevocable and 
staggering fact of their armed revolt, indeed, that 
new considerations of Ireland are now bound to 
start. 

THE EXECUTIONS 

What identified all of Ireland with the rebellion 
was the cold slaughters by the military tribunal in 
Dublin. Against the background of the European 
war the revolt demanded of British statesmanship 
that it should be held up as a tiny spurt of insanity. 
John Redmond had proved on the instant that he 
was ready to detach his Ireland from the rebellion. 
He called the Sinn Fein rebels his enemies. He de- 
nounced them as misguided and insane. But the 
military tribunal did the one thing that forced all Ire- 
land to see the rebellion in the perspective of Irish 
history. It exacted its pound of flesh. Pearse, the 
passionate teacher of Gaelic; MacDonagh, intro- 
spective, overworked, scrupulous, the mild poet en- 
wrapped for several years in the training of Vol- 
unteers; Plunkett, so ill that he was held back at 
Ellis Island the previous August; Connolly, the labor 
leader who was leaving a wife and eight children; 
Clark, the old Fenian tobacconist; Pearse's young 
brother the sculptor; O'Hanrahan, Daly, Major 
McBride; these were the insane and the wicked. 

[ 270 ] 



They were given to Ireland and to Irish history, 
the blood sacrifices of being national, when they 
were blindfolded by the soldiers and stood against 
a wall and shot dead. 

They died proudly and gladly. They had a clear 
faith and they expected to die. " Do we not boast," 
wrote Pearse a few weeks before the rising, " of our 
loyalty and love for the Dear Dark Head? Is it 
fear that deters us from such an enterprise? Away 
with such fears. Cowards die many times, the 
brave only die once. It is admitted that nothing but 
a revolution can now save the historic Irish nation 
from becoming a mere appanage, a Crown Colony 
of the British Empire. We do not desire such a 
consummation of the Island of Saints and Scholars, 
the land of the O'Neills and the O'Donnells, the 
land for which countless have suffered and died." 

Those Saints and Scholars may not seem real but 
few can read Pearse's words without feeling his con- 
secration to historic Ireland. The men in khaki 
who judged him could not understand this. They 
could not understand what the wise leaders in South 
Africa understood in dealing with De Wet. They 
could not see that vengeance was vindication. The 
entrenchment of Sir Edward Carson in the heart 
of privilege was too glaring. Only from the nation- 
alists they took an eye for an eye, a tooth for a 
tooth, but this made their justice an injustice. Only 
by a weapon of the spirit could they have encount- 
ered the claims of Pearse's spirit. They killed his 
body, but gave the precious part of him a national 
immortality. 

Ireland to me is a sad, wet, empty country, — a 
country of frustrated natives and detached, patroniz- 

[ 271 ] 



ing, smart, unsympathetic English people. The 
English, or Anglo-Irish, are in Ireland but not of it. 
To submit to their slow and steady pressure is un- 
desirable, but they pervade Ireland with their assur- 
ance, their monied superiority, their privilege. 
They stifle even the claims of Ireland. It is only a 
nature capable of ecstasy like Pearse's that can rise 
above these sodden commonplaces, and connect 
himself with " the O'Neills and the O'Donnells." 
To give the ecstasy a common habiliment he had to 
prove the English his nation's persecutor and to be 
shot down after a brief sacrificial hour. 

For a few years, beyond doubt, Pearse and Mac- 
Donagh and Plunkett had drifted toward this re- 
bellion. In a civilized country they would have 
found another ideal. They would have been busy 
thinking and writing on something beyond, or out- 
side, a national plane. But in Ireland they had to 
choose between a subtle colonial subservience and a 
monstrous nationalism. They were too gallant not 
to choose the nationalism. Yeats and Hyde and 
George Russell set them a certain example. Those 
men could function, in spite of England. But 
Pearse and MacDonagh and Plunkett were intensely 
Catholic and thus close to the tradition of the people. 
It was part of their fierce loyalty not to find a way 
out, like Douglas Hyde's non-partisan Gaelic 
League or Yeats' non-partisan sestheticism or Rus- 
sell's non-partisan cooperative ideal. They shared 
the disabilities of being nationalist in their own 
country too well to wish for a dispensation. It was 
easy for absentees like Shaw or Oscar Wilde to go 
to London to become detached and non-national. 
But cultivated young Catholics, shy and ascetic and 
[ 272 ] 



patriotic, had a somewhat different consciousness of 
the Irish people. Being Catholic, identified these 
aspiring youths with a mercilessly unremitting na- 
tionalism. It forced them, proud and isolated, to 
dwell with burning zeal on a history tragically their 
own. 

CYCLOPS 

The early days of the Irish Volunteer movement 
must have been an extraordinary revelation to these 
young men. No one suspected the latent spirit of 
militarism in the Catholic part of Ireland. It was 
unpredictable. But nothing, not the Gaelic League 
in its most ardent days, brought young Irishmen to- 
gether so spontaneously and happily as the chance 
to drill and to train. Under MacNeill, the Bel- 
fast vice-president of the Gaelic League, the Vol- 
unteers imbibed a real spirit. But the instinct for 
arms was the marvel. One thinks of the oppor- 
tunity that Daniel O'Connell, hater of the French 
Revolution, refused to consider. 

Sir Roger Casement, more romantic than Cun- 
ninghame-Graham, came into the later organizing. 
But the first work was done by these younger men. 
Carson was largely a joke in 19 13 in the south of 
Ireland. Only Catholics who had lived in Belfast 
could take the Northerns seriously. And never was 
there acrimony between the Irish and the Ulster 
Volunteers. It was England, in the end, that figured 
in the Dubliners' imaginations. They saw that 
England had shamefully evaded the home rule set- 
tlement. Carson had defied the Liberals, Asquith 
and Loreburn and Churchill had trimmed. Then 
the war came. After all the trimming, Unionist 

[ 273 ] 



and Liberal both looked hungrily at Ireland's man- 
power. How to take it! The Volunteers saw con- 
scription in the eyes of the politicians. They dis- 
trusted Redmond. They came near hating him, 
better known around Westminster than around the 
South Circular Road or Rathgar. Conscription 
more than the war came to decide the rebels' calcu- 
lations. The formation of the coalition cabinet had 
a definite effect on their outlook. It seemed to 
them like the death-knell of home rule, the tocsin 
of a British unity against Ireland. It had much to 
do with their desperate resolution to act. The gov- 
ernment, in addition, showed that it suspected the 
Irish Volunteers from the beginning. It hovered 
over them, waiting to suppress them. What was 
really a traditional ferment of nationalism until the 
government discriminated against nationalist gun- 
running, became, under provocation, a logical ac- 
ceptance of death. 

When you think of Pearse with his fine school, all 
his mother's money in it; MacDonagh, father of two 
young children by whom he was enthralled; Plunk- 
ett, with his two young brothers and ambitious to 
run the Irish Review; Connolly, working at the labor 
problem for unorganized Dublin — the personal 
cost of insurrection is seen to have been limitless. 
But they planned it coolly and deliberately, in every 
infinite detail. Spied on continually, under the eyes 
of police and military, they had invaluable aid from 
girls and women who did much necessary plotting 
while they and their followers went about their work. 
The experiences of Garibaldi was one of the models 
they studied most closely, but they dug out and 
printed the best of insurrectionary lore. They in- 
[ 274 ] 



tended, prayed for, hoped for, a paralyzing blow at 
the established government. They spared no pains 
to perfect their machine. 

English government, put to the test, no more 
understood them than a Cyclopean giant. It beheld 
them as utterly mad, dangerous, malignant. It could 
not forgive them, especially in the week of Kut-el- 
Amara. It went through all the correct forms of 
field general court-martial, and made haste to shed 
their blood. One may suppose they were dazed 
at the despatch of it, the shocking assassin-secrecy. 
But, whatever their horror, they had bargained for 
it and they entered with tense wills into a tradition 
that was sacred in their souls. After Ulster, one 
may scarcely say that they had no right to distrust 
English government, but one may blame them for 
being desperate. One may think of them as dream- 
ers and visionaries. One may wonder if they saw 
both sides of their alliance with black destruction 
and death. They took with them hundreds of trust- 
ing youths. They sacrificed innocent people. They 
led out Enniscorthy and Clonmel and Galway to a 
hopeless attempt to unite. But with all there is to 
be said against them, there is this to be said for 
them : they loved Ireland. They knew she was be- 
ing stifled. They had kept the spark in her alive. 
They were willing to be human torches in her night. 



[ 275 ] 



X 

UNEDUCATED IRELAND 

THE POWER OF THE PRIESTS 

1 HE last great fight," a Socialist leader once said 
to me, " will be between the Blacks and the Reds." 
This was Victor Berger's way of putting his belief 
that social democracy and the Catholic religion are 
in fundamental conflict. 

The rumors of this conflict are often discussed 
among the Catholics themselves. In Ireland, which 
for the most part knows about the world at third 
hand, one used to hear the darkest accounts of 
France and Italy. When I was a boy the name of 
Garibaldi was synonymous with everything wicked 
and disgusting. I remember the unction with which 
we were told how the lounging porters in Limerick 
spat down on Italian sailors who sang of Garibaldi 
as they unloaded their freight. But it was more 
common to hear how France had attacked Mother 
Church, and had " fallen away from the faith." 
Everything evil that befell France was construed as a 
visitation from Providence, to be parallelled with the 
fate of that infamous Cromwellian whose arm was 
instantly withered as he raised it to smite the Cross 
over St. Canice's. 

These convictions as to the sacrilegious character 
of any interference with the church were carried into 
[ 276 ] 



our own native life. When we bestowed on the 
child of an alien religion the pleasant title of Proddy- 
Woddy-Green-Gut, we were only a step from believ- 
ing that the priest could turn a Parnellite into a goat. 
In the secret lore which children transmit from one 
set to another, this belief may still survive in a differ- 
ent form. And I am sure they are still telling about 
the French atheist who mutilated the sacramental 
wafer, and had to send for a priest to stop its bleed- 
ing. 

Among a people whose partisanship has been sanc- 
tified by oppression, it is inevitable that little sym- 
pathy should be felt for the countries that set them- 
selves against the church in politics. In Ireland dis- 
loyalty to the church is regarded as a base disaffec- 
tion, a betrayal of the noblest traditions of the race. 
When the people were outcast on the hillsides, the 
priests were their friends. In 1798, Father Murphy 
led the boys of Wexford " to burst in twain the gall- 
ing chain, and free our native land." In the agra- 
rian war there was always a Father Casey to be 
heralded as the savior " who found us serfs, and left 
us freemen and owners of the soil." The tenderness 
which the common Irish feel for the priests is a deep 
and heartfelt tenderness. It was conceived in the 
mutual experience of the Penal Laws. It throbs 
through the novels of men like Kickham and Griffin 
who were close to the country people and knew their 
hearts, and it was riveted again through the heroism 
and self-sacrifice of the Famine years. All the func- 
tions that a democratic government might usefully 
assume — the functions, for example, that give Tam- 
many Hall its opportunity and its power in New 
York city — have fallen to the priesthood in Ire- 

[ 277 ] 



land. The priesthood volunteered its paternal care 
to men who found nature niggardly, the landlord 
either remote or arbitrary, and the government 
inimical. Even today it is the priest who stands be- 
tween the estates commissioner and the mystified 
tenant. It is the priest who negotiates the loan for 
a hay-barn. The greater the dependence of the 
country people, the more enormous the obligation to 
the one apparently disinterested and enlightened man 
in the entire isolated community. 

A PEASANT ARISTOCRACY 

But even where isolation is removed, the priest re- 
mains as a power in the community. The priesthood 
is the aristocracy of the Irish peasant. Crude and 
lumpish as the young curate may sometimes appear 
to the outer world, there is one woman to whom that 
crude and lumpish man is a veritable miracle. The 
romance of every farmer's wife in Catholic Ireland 
is realized in that curate. The mother of a Prime 
Minister has no more joy in her son than the mother 
of an Irish priest. No one in the world, not her 
husband nor her own mother, can dispute his place 
in her household. The trepidation with which the 
priest's mother regards the fruit of her womb is 
singular among the emotions of maternity. She re- 
gards him as assured of that salvation for which the 
rest of the world is anxiously striving. Everyone 
else is on probation, but no matter how dull he seem 
to the mundane observer, to her he is God's 
Anointed, a thing consummated and immune. This 
most powerful emotion may be experienced by only 
a few of the half million mothers in Ireland, but it 
is her supreme attainment and anything that attacks 
[ 278 ] 



the priesthood touches this maternal instinct at its 
core. 

Besides this jealous maternal phalanx, the priest- 
hood is protected by its own inherent power. Re- 
cruited from the farmers of Ireland, the priests are 
not only the chosen of their kind, but they constitute 
their class's representatives. In the mere matter of 
income, the average priest is frequently more stable 
and sometimes more affluent than his father. One 
of his extra-ecclesiastical activities is to look out for 
his own clan. Sometimes this is done by the eager 
use of influence in popular elections. When a man 
is seeking office in the county districts of Ireland, his 
first move is to invoke the aid of his cousin Father 
Mat or his brother Father Toby. The county coun- 
cils and the boards of guardians are decidedly re- 
sponsive to priestly electioneering, and that candi- 
date is esteemed lucky who wants the coronership in 
a community where he has the backing of the priests. 
Even in business this support is highly important, 
and there are few professional men, doctors or den- 
tists or solicitors or veterinary surgeons, whose fate 
is not largely in the hands of the clergy. In addi- 
tion to the power they wield in this direction, the 
priests and bishops are zealous in forwarding the pri- 
vate fortunes of their own families. Their liberal- 
ity is proverbial. Many a young lady in Ireland has 
been educated at the expense of her ecclesiastical 
uncle. Fathers, brothers, sisters, cousins, nieces, 
nephews will consult at the priest's house over ways 
and means, and the lame dog knows who will help 
him over the stile. 

By these subterranean powers and activities, the 
priesthood of Ireland has strengthened its grip 

[ 279 ] 



on the country through a process natural and inevi- 
table. As a body of men, they are by far the most 
formidable and dominant in social life. This domi- 
nance and formidability is evident in their personal 
appearance. Where the young lad on the farms is 
often anaemic and slack-jawed, there is nothing anae- 
mic about the celibate clergy. Most of them born to 
the plough, accustomed to the hardships of the farm, 
muscular and hearty, they emerge from the diocesan 
seminary without any visible diminution of their 
vigor. In later life, they are often rather gross. I 
remember a splendid old Chicago Irishman who came 
back from a tour of his native country and France 
with an exalted sense of the ascetic French abbe but 
a disillusioned conviction that " there are too many 
fat parish priests." One is sorry for the parochial 
steed that has to dray them to and fro. But they are 
clearly men of authority, position and substance, 
stout pillars of a stout institution. 

THE GOOD AND TFIE BAD 

From the standpoint of ecclesiastical policy, and 
its pliancy in Ireland, it is unfortunate that so many 
of the priests come to the sacristy so straight from 
the ploughed field. There is no Celtic melancholy 
about the Irish farmers who have produced the red- 
necked New York policeman, the lusty Third Avenue 
saloon-keeper, the Tammany precinct captain. The 
priests of Ireland come from the same tough stock. 
Many of them become wise and lovable pastors, 
strong of body, mind and will, large-hearted and 
essentially good. In the reports of the provincial 
newspapers one is constantly thrilled by the sincerity 
and magnanimity of their espousal of the " human 
[ 280 ] 



cause." But apart from these good men there is a 
proportion of the clergy who retain the craft and 
the ignorance of the isolated farm, and support their 
insularity in truculence. These develop into power- 
ful demagogues of conservatism and reaction. 
Transformed neither by Maynooth nor their Holy 
Office, they are apostles of intimidation, unreason 
and ill-will. Their nationalism is a consecration of 
low methods to the attainment of specious and 
bigoted ends. It is hard to blame them, because 
they have neither traveled nor inquired nor read. 
They are cocks on their native dungheaps. But the 
practical disadvantage is that they provide a medium 
for germinating those squalid policies that depend on 
stubbornness and prejudice for perpetuation. They 
push their way to the front in local and national 
issues, and are unfailingly enlisted by the jobbers 
and gombeen men of their parishes. 

The Irish hierarchy contains its quota of such men. 
To balance them there are several bishops who are 
genuine statesmen, anxious to forward the best inter- 
ests of the country that they know and love. The 
Catholic hierarchy naturally devotes its power to 
ecclesiastical ends. Its interest in the Irish people is 
the same as an old-fashioned mother's interest in her 
obedient daughter. So long as the daughter is at 
home at sundown, and at hand to do what she is 
told, the mother does not care if the house is stuffy 
and the entertainment rather scant. She conducts 
her affairs at large without consulting her child, and 
in those affairs she is principally concerned that her 
menage will in no way be disturbed. She is about as 
revolutionary as a hen. 

[ 281 ] 



CHURCH AND STATE 

With the Church so constituted, the question as to 
the relations between democracy and Papal religion 
becomes extremely significant, even though the facts 
reveal a feral condition among the country people. 

Under Pope Pius X the church certainly did not 
mince matters as to the primacy of church au- 
thority. In the decree of October 9, 19 11, the Vati- 
can issued its ordinance concerning the freedom of 
Catholics to exercise their legal rights as against 
priests, and it declared " that any person who with- 
out permission from an ecclesiastical authority sum- 
mons before a lay court of justice any ecclesiastical 
person in any case, civil or criminal, incurs instant 
excommunication. The excommunication takes 
place automatically and absolution is reserved to the 
Pope himself." 

Not being a theologian, I cannot say whether this 
decree has theological validity. It is possible, as 
Cardinal Newman showed, to combine obedience in 
matters of faith and morals with a strong independ- 
ence as to ecclesiastical pronouncements. But, on 
the face of it, this decree affirms the right of the 
church to order all of its members to forego certain 
powers conferred by the modern state. It takes out 
of the layman's hands the instrument of justice 
put there at the instance of democracy. It de- 
prives a citizen of his freedom in a matter, not of 
faith or of morals, but of civil and criminal admin- 
istration. It actually compels the Catholic to give 
legal immunity to a criminal priest, unless a non- 
Catholic act in his stead, or unless an ecclesiastical 
authority allow him to proceed. If he is forbidden 
[ 282 ] 



to proceed, he is prohibited by his church, under the 
severest penalty it can inflict, from bringing the 
criminal to justice. 

If this Papal ordinance is valid, it proves beyond 
doubt that the Catholic church is nakedly opposed to 
the free exercise of civic rights 

Perhaps the church has the right to fix any eccle- 
siastical punishment it likes for a serious breach of 
discipline. But excommunication deprives a Catholic 
of the sacraments. It is a religious penalty. That 
the church should inflict such a penalty for an act 
which has nothing to do with faith, and breaks no 
moral law, merely emphasizes the conclusion that 
the Catholic religion, as such, can oblige its adherents 
to forego their civic rights. This conclusion de- 
stroys full community between Catholic and non- 
Catholic citizens, and so violates a primary requisite 
of democracy. 

The Catholic priest comes to citizenship under a 
special disadvantage. Solicitous before everything 
about the faith of his people, his interest in the peo- 
ple is not primarily democratic. It is primarily theo- 
cratic. He is bound in the nature of things to look 
upon the state as an instrument for ecclesiastical 
rather than social ends. That this creates not only a 
formal, but a real conflict of interests is written large 
on the history of Europe and the United States. It 
accounts for the extreme jealousy with which demo- 
crats everywhere inspect the activity of the church in 
politics. It justifies the democrats' belief that 
churchmen will subvert the state to further their re- 
ligion, and will forever strive to turn government 
into an ecclesiastical annex. 

[ 283 ] 



THE PROTECTION IN A DEMOCRACY 

What weapon has democracy against this willing- 
ness of the churchmen to subvert the state? 

In a country largely Catholic, it has no defence if 
such decrees as the one quoted are valid. Democ- 
racy is impossible in a country where men give their 
primary allegiance to a subversive religion. 

The significant fact about the statesmen of the 
Catholic religion, however, is that they have one 
policy in regard to one state, and another policy in a 
different state. In those countries where democratic 
principles are well understood, and where public 
opinion is mature and mobile, the leaders of the 
Catholic church do not publicly try to castrate citi- 
zenship. The loophole, therefore, for Catholics 
who believe in the full exercise of civic rights is to 
keep the priest strictly where he belongs, attending 
to faith and morals. 

It is perfectly true, of course, that the priest has a 
direct concern in the faith and morality of his 
parishioners, and is constrained to work for faith 
and morality by every means in his power. But in 
the domain of social, as distinguished from religious, 
fatherhood, the one chance for democracy is to have 
the priest remain a plain citizen, no more and no 
less. No matter what the history of the country 
where he abides, his standing as a priest entitles him 
to no authority beyond his standing as a man. He 
has no more right to impose his will upon his fellow- 
citizens because he wears a soutane, than a woman 
voter would have a right to impose her wishes be- 
cause she wears a skirt. Privileged in his character 
as an ecclesiastic, the priest becomes a layman the 
[ 284 ] 



minute he leaves the parish house, unless he is on 
his way to act as a chaplain. Professionally con- 
cerned though he may be in keeping his parishioners 
faithful and moral, he is entitled to no special con- 
cessions from the state in this respect; and the state 
that gives him special concessions does so at its own 
peril. The priest off duty should stand on the same 
civic plane as the solicitor off duty or the army 
officer off duty. If his life be consecrated to the 
spiritual welfare of the people, it does not follow 
that he is therefore equipped to order their social 
welfare. On the contrary, he is, as was said be- 
fore, under the disadvantage of not being completely 
disinterested. 

Since social organization is an ordering of con- 
flicting interests as well as an attempt at impartiality, 
there is no logical reason why the clergy of any 
church should not be active in politics. There are 
but two great dangers. One is that the clergy will 
always be powerfully tempted to aggrandize their 
church, and to do so with that unscrupulousness 
which men seem to regard as almost creditable when 
they can absolve themselves from personal, as against 
institutional, hunger. The other is the danger that 
clerical leaders will use their immense power to in- 
flict religious and social penalties on men who act 
contrary to their wishes. 

THE NEED FOR DEMOCRACY 

The Catholic church in Ireland resembles Tam- 
many Hall very closely in the manner in which it tries 
to penalize the independent man. It is said by Sir 
Horace Plunkett and others that the Catholic Irish- 
man is dreadfully lacking in moral courage. But it 

[285 ] 



takes an extraordinary brand of courage to fight an 
organization that has its allies, its dependents, its 
nurslings, in every hole and corner, that has its 
fingers on the economic pipe-line, and that can punish 
disobedience by cutting of! education from your chil- 
dren, friendship from your household, religious exer- 
cise from your soul, and food and drink and revenue 
and office from our own isolated self. These punish- 
ments cannot be inflicted on the man who has one 
foot in Dublin and the other, so to speak, in London. 
They cannot be inflicted on anyone but the man whose 
prospects and goodwill are invested among the Irish 
commonalty. But there they can be inflicted, and 
are inflicted, with a cruel will; and it is only where 
a few independent men make common cause against 
such underhand and maleficent tyranny that any as- 
sertion of individual will is possible. The instances 
of this social tyranny, supplied by pure and good men 
as well as by bigots and adulterers and cranks and 
scoundrels, fill many indisputable volumes. The 
countryside is full of them. The public sermon, no 
less than the secret cabal, has served the priesthood 
in its brazen campaign against the men of backbone. 
If it were not for the reasons that endear the church 
to Ireland, and intertwine Irish mothers and fathers 
with the religion they adore, this tyranny could not 
long persist. 

Were the sins of the priests physical rather than 
sociological, Ireland would long ago have awakened 
to their power. But the clergy's immaculate reputa- 
tion for chastity has franked them in their lust for 
power. 

Since it is almost impossible for Protestants, not 
to say Catholics, to carry out a helpful policy in Ire- 
[ 286] 



land " without permission from an ecclesiastical au- 
thority," it is idle to ignore the fact that the church 
is a highly organized political, and in many ways 
undemocratic, machine. The British government 
recognizes it as such, and uses it as such, when pos- 
sible. Meanwhile, Ireland is edified by lectures on 
moral courage, and remains some distance behind 
the countries that are without such extreme benefit 
of clergy. 

UNEDUCATED 

One condition of Irish life that has favored the 
ultramontane clergy to an inordinate degree has 
been the deficiency of higher education for Catholics. 
Until quite recently the Catholic priesthood itself has 
had a notoriously narrow training, but the layman 
has had nothing acceptable in the way of a univer- 
sity at all. It does not seem credible. It does not 
seem as if a white community of three million persons 
within the British empire could have come down to 
1908 without anything faintly resembling a popular 
university. Such has been the plight of Ireland. 
The absence of a popular university has reacted on 
popular teaching in the lower grades all through the 
country. Religious orders trained on the continent 
have conducted boarding schools for the Catholic 
bourgeoisie, the boys faring much better than the 
girls. But the effect of the policy of the church at 
large has combined with the effect of the policy of the 
government to keep the Irish Catholic ignorant. No 
one factor in Irish history is more important or more 
pitiable than this. 

Everyone grants what education means in the un- 
folding of human power. Everyone grants what it 

[287] 



means in the experiment of personality and the conse- 
cration of group achievement and the direction of 
public will. The aristocratic tradition of English 
education has sorely confined it, yet one has only to 
mention Oxford or Cambridge to have the sense of a 
deep and exquisite process, a process as friendly to 
the human spirit as the airs of Kerry are friendly to 
the arbutus. The tradition of the university of 
Paris is carried through the world as the breath of a 
mighty being, and the name of sturdy Scottish educa- 
tion is like the name of a strong buckler or a flashing 
glaive. It was not for nothing that the eyes of New 
England narrowed to intense concentration on the 
ideal of education or that this ideal was borne all 
over the United States by the descendants of New 
England. Education is a word that holds within 
itself the rein and the spur of every human impulse, 
the leadership or discipleship of everything from the 
atom to the star. And yet the Irish Catholic, asking 
where his Oxford or Paris or Vienna or Bologna or 
Moscow was to be found, had to go back to the days 
of King Alfred, to the parched honeycombs of Clon- 
macnoise. We know that Catholic boyhood tried to 
steal a little wild honey in the eighteenth century. 
The word " hedge-school " preserves that persecuted 
age. But the Latin of shepherd-boys and the lore 
of wandering scholars is a flitting wraith of educa- 
tional tradition for an eager and responsive people. 
It is the only one they have had. Trinity College, 
Dublin, is nominally the aristocrat of Irish educa- 
tion. Actually it is a denationalized institution 
marked off from the country that has supported its 
existence, a glum cousin of Oxford and Cambridge. 
It was chartered by Queen Elizabeth, " founded not 
[ 288 ] 



simply to spread learning," as a frank United States 
Bulletin of 19 17 puts it, " but to strengthen the Es- 
tablished Irish (Protestant Episcopal) Church and 
to Anglicize the Irish nation." When it was pro- 
posed in 1907 by Lord Bryce, then Mr. Bryce, that 
Trinity forget this task of being Svengali to the 
Irish Trilby and come into a new Irish university, to 
include a college for Catholics, a " defence com- 
mittee " of 5000 " argued that the ideals of Trinity 
were incompatible with the principles of authority 
and of scientific theory as expressed in the ' Index. ' " 
Its own " ideals " included another Index, but this 
Trinity could not see. It has never quite emanci- 
pated its spirit or stepped out from the shadow of 
ulterior motive. About one-sixth of the students 
since 1871 have been Catholics. Nationalists like 
John Redmond and Douglas Hyde have graduated 
from it, with a slow tendency on the part of some of 
its fellows to see Ireland as something other than a 
fallen sister. But Trinity could never forget that it 
was " planted as a bulwark of English and Protestant 
influences," and, despite such liberality as its admis- 
sion of women in 1904 and such glories as the names 
of Burke and Berkeley, its teachers have remained 
exclusively Protestant and almost uniformly anti- 
Nationalist — with Sir Edward Carson as one of its 
two Unionist M.Ps. Thus, in the centre of Dublin, 
stands a lump of ascendancy, lapped vainly by the 
stream of national life. 

THE FALLEN SISTER 

I have spoken of the fallen-sister idea of Ireland, 
It has been the fashion of English and Scotch educa- 
tionalists to approach the Irish system in this spirit, 

[ 289 ] 



commiseration linking with superiority. Mr. Gra- 
ham Balfour gives a perfect example of the attitude 
in his book on primary education in 1899. " Last 
comes Ireland," he murmured, " poor and in sub- 
jection, passionately attached to her faith; lovable 
and unreliable and helpless, the child among nations; 
the Celtic genius, mysterious and impractical, ' al- 
ways bound nowhere under full sail,' abandoned to 
obsolete methods and inadequate in their aim, be- 
cause reform means the calling up of many quarrels." 
The quarrels are indubitable, but there was some- 
thing back of the whole difficulty, from kindergarten 
to college, besides this " mysterious and impractical 
Celtic genius." As Trinity College demonstrates, 
the idea of educating Ireland was steadily subordi- 
nated. The prime idea was to Anglicize Ireland. 
The obstacle of Catholicism came in the way of every 
educational system, and England never faced that 
obstacle until the proportion of Englishmen to Irish- 
men has risen from two to one to nine to one. The 
Catholic church, incidentally, sacrificed Ireland in its 
desire for dominance. But the only impracticality 
in the situation was Ireland's being Irish instead of 
English, the only mystery the eternal mystery, that 
round pegs will not fit into square holes. 

Englishmen like Matthew Arnold blamed Liberal- 
ism for the conflict. Just as Arnold had declared in 
the midst of Gladstone's fascinating legerdemain that 
" tenant-right was better than nothing, but ownership 
is better still," so he attacked the nonconformist atti- 
tude on Ireland's higher education. He knew that a 
vast number of good Protestants fanatically believed 
that " the English state did recognize as a funda- 
mental duty to give an active and exclusive support 
[ 290 ] 



to a certain religion." So Gladstone had argued in 
1838. But this did not repress the persistent apostle 
of culture. " When the Irish ask to have public 
schools and universities suited to Catholics," he said, 
" as England has public schools and universities 
suited to Anglicans, and Scotland such as are suited 
to Presbyterians, you fall back in embarrassment 
upon your formula of pedants, c The Liberal party 
has emphatically condemned religious endowment,' 
then you give to the advocates of separation a new 
lease of power and influence. You enable them still 
to keep saying with truth, that they have ' the forces 
of nature, the forces of nationality, and the forces of 
patriotism,' on their side." 

SEVENTY YEARS OF EVASION 

After 70 years of dodging the fundamental fact 
that Irish Catholics must have a university " suited 
to them," the English government at last braced 
itself to the enormous effort of devising a national 
institution that was something more than an annex 
to the royal Irish constabulary. On the other side, 
after holding out against the " godless colleges " 
since 1850, the Catholic bishops braced themselves to 
the equally enormous effort of accepting a non-sec- 
tarian establishment. Meanwhile the Catholic youth 
of Ireland, the football of church and state, had had 
two generations of intellectual twilight. The great 
nonconformist English Liberals had never considered 
the alternative to their undenominational precept. 
It was denominational ignorance. That ignorance 
was accepted by the Catholic bishops in preference to 
" godless " education, though the cost to Ireland of 
ignorance was hardly to be calculated and never to be 

[ 291 ] 



corrected. A political student would have to search 
a long time before he could find a better example of 
the selfishness of church and state. What the unen-. 
dowed bishops required was a fair run for Irish uni- 
versity money — a chance to make themselves felt, 
that is, in a well-endowed institution. What the 
state wanted was an ecclesiastical capitulation at the 
price of a university. Both results have been fairly 
well ensured by the government's ceasing to play the 
bishops' game by gagging Catholicism and by devis- 
ing a representative governing body at the same time. 
But the Irish people had to wait centuries for this 
maceration of prejudice. 

The circumstances of the deadlock are not obscure. 
Nothing was easier for Cobden or Bright than to see 
the evils of landlordism. That was a kind of privi- 
lege, a source of authority, that they could heartily 
declare war on. But when it came to helping the 
Irish Catholics qua Catholics something sickened in- 
side them. " With my whole soul I am convinced," 
said Gladstone in 1850, " that if the Roman system 
is incapable of being powerfully modified in spirit, 
it never can be the instrument of the work of God 
among us; the faults and the virtues of England are 
alike against it." This was said when the Trac- 
tarian tide was rolling in, and Newman had sailed 
out to Rome with colors flying and many boats were 
straining at anchor. The increase of the grant to. 
Catholic Maynooth in 1845 had put Gladstone's 
principles to the test. Bright wrote of it hotly and 
contemptuously. " The object of this bill is to tame 
down those agitators — it is a sop given to the 
priests. It is hush-money, given that they may not 
proclaim to the whole country, to Europe, and to 
[ 292 ] 



the world the sufferings of the population to whom 
they administer the rights and the consolations of 
religion." 

NOT UNTIL 1908 ! 
In course of time Gladstone was to change, but 
before he did so there were to be several futile efforts 
to solve higher education in Ireland. The first was 
Peel's attempt to establish a " godless " university, 
to meet the needs of all three denominations. It is 
significant of the hard accent on religion that all 
three denominations — the Catholic bishops by a ma- 
jority of one — pronounced against the Queen's uni- 
versity. Thereupon, in 1854, the forlorn Newman 
strove to found a Catholic university in Dublin, a 
college and a school of medicine, but his failure to 
get money, even state money, left his institution a 
skeleton. After nearly twenty years Gladstone re- 
sponded to continued agitation by elaborating a 
scheme of his own. He made up his mind to feder- 
ate Trinity, the Queen's university, the Presbyterian 
Magee College, and this Catholic university. With 
every resource of his high-minded craftiness he de- 
vised it so that, though the scheme was to be Liberal 
and non-sectarian, and though " controversial " 
studies were to be barred, the first steps of the 
Catholics on to this plank of his platform would dis- 
lodge a small state endowment and flip it into their 
sectarian lap. It was an exceedingly pretty device 
for endowing the non-endowable. Unfortunately, 
the sum involved was rather tiny and the ultramon- 
tane Catholic cardinal refused to spring the trap. 
Disraeli came along later to make one of his gestures 
of statesmanship. He established a decree-con fer- 

[ 293 ] 



ring body in 1880, providing fellowships for Catho- 
lics and Presbyterians, and he called it the Royal 
university. It was not till 1908 that this savage 
aridity was remedied. 

In 1908 the Royal university was dissolved and a 
National university chartered, to include Queen's 
College, Cork; Queen's College, Galway; University 
College, Dublin; and the Cecilia Street Medical 
School. A Queen's university of Belfast was char- 
tered under the same act. All religious tests were 
prohibited and religious bias in teaching provided 
against, in both establishments, but no " gagging 
clauses " even on theology. The state endowment 
amounted to about £100,000 a year. In 1914— 15 
there were 545 students at Belfast, no at Galway, 
407 at Cork, 787 at Dublin. At Belfast 95% of the 
students were non-Catholic, at Cork 20%, at Dublin 
and Galway 2%. Yet the non-sectarian principle of 
the National university came out in the election of 
senators in 19 14, when a Jesuit professor, two Prot- 
estant professors and five Catholic laymen were 
chosen. When one remembers that in 1902 only 
170 Catholics were attending Galway, Cork and Bel- 
fast put together, this new establishment is exhibited 
as a national success. Its very success, however, is 
likely to make Irishmen think hardly of that ruinous 
educational vista behind it. Meanwhile elementary 
and secondary education are hopelessly constricted by 
the bureaucracy in command of it. 

THE ELEMENTARY SYSTEM 

In 19 13 a viceregal committee was appointed to 

treat the system for its convulsions without being 

permitted to go into all the details. Out of a heart 

[ 294 ] 



too full of repression, however, the committee's final 
report exceeded its instructions and exclaimed, " The 
system is essentially bureaucratic and centralized, and 
subject to no regular popular control, whether local 
or parliamentary." An unpaid board of twenty ap- 
pointed in the closets of the government in equal pro- 
portions of Catholic and Protestant, has casual and 
intermittent contact with the affairs of elementary 
education in Ireland, but the Tsar is the resident com- 
missioner. A deplorable suggestion of the real con- 
dition of affairs is to be pieced together from the re- 
marks of the resident commissioner himself, W. J. 
M. Starkie, M.A., Litt.D., LL.D. Dr. Starkie 
unconsciously betrayed the system. " Between the 
government, which appointed me for certain purposes 
and then deserted me because they turned out to be 
unpopular, and the teachers, whose growing indisci- 
pline and resistance to recognized authority have 
been fostered by Ministers and other politicians, pos- 
sibly innocently, possibly for ulterior ends, my task 
as an administrator has been harder than most men 
could bear. I am aware that the path I tread leads 
neither to honor nor preferment; but I have fought 
the good fight and I am not without my consolations." 
It is the very accent of Tsardom. " I am the true 
friend of merit wherever I find it. That I am capa- 
ble of doing any one a deliberate injustice ... is a 
ridiculous charge, which recoils upon the heads of the 
wicked men that have made it." 

During several bad administrative storms that 
raged before this inquiry of 19 13 practically all the 
board supported their commissioner. " The irre- 
sponsible rule of English and Irish Treasury and 
Castle clerks " was the common enemy. " We are a 

[ 295 ] 



very unpopular body," the commissioner wildly de- 
clared, " but we know perfectly well that ... if 
anybody attempted to put his hand on us his fate 
would be that of the person who put his hand on the 
ark." Yet the fact remained that warfare between 
the teachers and their inspectors was passionate. 
" Every appeal, small or great," the commissioner 
boasted, came to his hands. But the multiplication 
of appeals demanded this special inquiry. 

The justification of this particular commissioner 
may be sought in the reforms between 1900 and 
1 9 13. When Mr. Balfour wrote in 1899 ne painted 
a black picture. " The study of agriculture, the only 
practical subject which has received attention," Mr. 
Balfour asserted, " has fluctuated between ruinous 
extravagance and a mechanical study of textbooks. 
The great inadequacy and insufficiency of the educa- 
tion given [in Ireland] during nine-tenths of the last 
century can hardly be exaggerated. More teachers, 
all fully qualified, well paid and well pensioned; a 
raising after school age; no half-time; better attend- 
ance; better buildings; provision for transfer to 
higher education." So said Mr. Balfour in 1899. 
Dr. Starkie ascribed any failure to carry out these 
reforms to " the apathy of the executive and the 
opposition of the treasury." The worst behavior 
of the treasury and the Castle, apparently, was to 
hold up plans for new schools, for six years. But 
when the government and the teachers and the in- 
spectors had all been blamed, and full credit allowed 
for the introduction of kindergarten and object-les- 
sons and elementary science and the increase of pay 
from £52 and £43 in 1877 to £112 and £90 in 19 10 
(for men and women teachers respectively), the fact 
[ 296] 



remained that the local managers of the schools — ■ 
almost always the clergymen — appoint and dismiss 
the teachers without any local consultation, and that 
the attendance only reached 73%. The 15,704 em- 
ployees of the school board could be as great a civil- 
izing influence as the Danish school teachers or the 
American school teachers. As it is, they are seething 
with unhappiness. 

The problem of sectarianism is subsiding. " The 
first fifty years of the national board," said the resi- 
dent commissioner, " were spent in quarrelling over 
the meaning of the word undenominational. ... At 
first the Catholics were the only people who approved 
of the system. The church of Ireland did not accept 
it for a very long time, and some of their schools are 
coming in only now. The Presbyterians went so far 
as to found gun clubs to shoot the inspectors. In the 
north of Ireland. The great question with the Pres- 
byterians in those days (and there is a strange re- 
crudescence of it in the last week or two) was 
whether it was right, as they put it, ' to edit the Holy 
Ghost.' " But the ferment caused by an uncon- 
trolled board, an uncontrolled commissioner, an un- 
controlled treasury, has retarded primary education 
in every part of the country, Belfast not less than 
Clonmel. This goes back to the utter distrust of the 
people, the attempt to placate sectarianism by giving 
the schools to clerical management, under one scheme 
or another. It is a striking and indeed terrible ex- 
ample of the evil result of British government in 
Ireland. Education, high and low, has been cruelly 
sacrificed to the suspicion and intolerance of remote 
and blind authority. This is one great reason for 
self-government. The nation itself must force its 
[ 297 ] 



admission to the government of the national school 
system and the problems of the teacher. The salva- 
tion of the country depends almost entirely on educa- 
tion. It cannot continue to be a mere bone of con- 
tention between church and state. 



[ 298 ] 



XI 
THE IRISH IDYL 

SORDID ! 

C-4ALL the Irish imaginative ! " Lady Waterford 
exclaimed to Lord Morley. " So they are on one 
side, or on the surface; in substance they are not im- 
aginative at all; they are sordid and prosaic. Look 
at marriage — love no part in it, 'tis an affair of so 
many cows; sentiment, not a spark of it! The 
woods in the park open for the public on summer 
evenings — do you ever see lads and lasses in lovers' 
pairs? Never, never. They are actors, and they 
all know they are actors; and each man knows that 
the man to whom he is talking is not only playing 
a part, but knows that he knows that he is playing 
a part. They cannot help lying, and they have no 
shame, not merely in being found out, but in being 
known to be lying as the words come fresh from their 
lips. Man, woman, and child, they are soaked and 
saturated in insincerity." 

Lord Morley's comment was silence. He saw 
that the lady was without heat or anger or contempt. 
The terrible picture was to her a complete picture. 
" I listened," writes Lord Morley, " with the pa- 
tience required by manners." 

Nothing is more gratifying, I think, than to sum 
up racial character in the manner of the old 

[ 299 ] 



geographies. But it is difficult, even with plain facts 
in front of you, to make a sound inference unless, 
of course, you are infallible. What would Lady 
Waterford have thought of the cabman who tied a 
shoe lace for Mrs. Martin, reported in Somerville 
and Ross's Irish Memories. " She thanked him 
with her usual and special skill in such matters, and, 
as she slowly moved away, she was pleased to hear 
her cabman remark to a fellow: 

" ' That's a dam pleshant owld heifer ! ' " 

If you were sufficiently literal, any such remark 
would be grossly " sordid and prosaic." It de- 
lighted Mrs. Martin. The difficulty is that patriot- 
ism compels a great many Irishmen to deny the half- 
truth that is back of Lady Waterford's harsh ob- 
servation, and to insist that the genuine Ireland is 
idyllic. 

This idyl is largely false. 

There is nothing idyllic, in honest fact, about the 
loveless marriages that are so often arranged over 
two pints of stout in the smelly parlor of a public- 
house, a counterpart of the property-marriages of 
royal families. Neither is there anything elegiac 
about the funerals that are one of the few occasions 
for conviviality in the remoter districts in Ireland. 
A few years ago a friend took me to the funeral 
of one of his customers — a woman publican — 
in a village in the hills on the borders of Kil- 
kenny, Waterford and Tipperary. I shall never 
forget the " mourners " who came in a steady 
procession into the back-parlor of the public house, 
to receive, with a minimum of conversation, what 
was evidently welcomed as a drink free of charge. 
The host, collarless and coatless, but wearing a 
[ 300 ] 



hat, served these drinks without more than a 
perfunctory greeting. The drinks were swallowed 
with business-like despatch, and the satisfied 
" mourner " gave place to the next thirsty soul, 
usually without a thank you. If he left any of his 
port in the tumbler, back it was slipped into the bot- 
tle, to be poured out for the next guest. I never saw 
anything more squalid in darkest Chicago. The 
publican was, in this case, a nephew of the woman 
who had died. He was a crafty, sibillant, under- 
handed hound, who whispered assets and liabilities 
with the brewer, with a callousness worthy of lower 
Broadway. Here was no idyl of an innocent coun- 
tryside, but a cesspool for which the only cure would 
be a whole system of drainage. 

UNCONTAMINATED 1 

But it is a mistake, it seems to me, to let one's 
" exasperation with human life " concentrate on na- 
tive incidents like this. Hundreds of these incidents, 
each at variance with the Irish idyl, might be col- 
lected in a week, but " all these problems," as George 
Russell recently said to a grumbler, " piled one on 
the top of another lay too heavy a burden upon our 
mortality. One at a time we might possibly deal 
with. But what is really the matter is that the 
whole social structure has grown up haphazard, that 
no brains have been put into Irish education, that as 
a consequence our popular instructors write down to 
a low level and we have everywhere a low level of 
knowledge." 

In London, I understand, there is a distinguished 
clique which still points with admiration to Ire- 
land's medievalism. They think of England as a 

[ 301 ] 



blind materialistic giant floundering his way through 
the slough while pure and simple Ireland has moved 
forward toward the goal with poetic clairvoyance. 
They contrast the fair hills of Ireland with the 
squalid Cockney mews. They talk raptly of a peas- 
ant proprietary. Dreamy and unpractical Ireland 
has worked out its salvation without socialism 
or syndicalism, eugenics, biometrics, economics. 
Science, the godless illusion, has passed Ireland by. 
Saved from class war, serene in her possession of the 
eternal verities, Ireland has never lost herself in the 
mazes of intellectualism. She has preserved that 
simplicity of soul which the Reformation and capi- 
talism combined to destroy. A lily on the modern 
ash-heap, she perfumes the world of sweatshops and 
slums with the ineffable aroma of another world. 
The Cinderella among sordid capitalistic jades, she 
looks with starry eyes at their Lesbian lusts, and 
turns away from them to tell her rosary. 

With all this admiration for inviolate medie- 
valism, very few of these gentlemen have left the 
worldliness which they deplore to perch on a fair hill 
in Ireland. One of them did leave, only to report 
priggishness, dullness and bad cooking. ( Cinderella 
thought him horrid.) And the only soul he discov- 
ered that outshone the ecclesiastical candles was that 
of the humorous poet, George Russell, who took so 
fierce an interest in education and abattoirs, catch- 
crops and winter dairying. As for the other intel- 
lectuals, they use Ireland as a stick with which to 
beat the Behemoth that they really love, the Cockney 
Behemoth that dominates them. 

With the intellectual fad of mediaevalism it is not 
important to deal, nor do I think that a slanderous 
[ 302 ] 



version of Ireland's mediaeval slums and sewers, 
prejudices and dullnesses, is a retort worth elaborat- 
ing. I am content to suggest the sheer vanity of pre- 
tending that Ireland is immunely naif, secure from 
the complexities of the modern capitalistic state. 

In one respect Ireland is indeed inviolate. Where 
modern industrialism has left visible nature in other 
countries mutilated and reproachful, Ireland is still 
unspoiled and proud. Industry has not gashed the 
countryside. Nor has the vulgarity of Tono-Bun- 
gay billboards invaded her. The perverts who sell 
the beauty of their own landscape in order to make 
money enough to buy a ticket from Cook to see 
somebody else's landscape — these perverts have not 
yet discovered that the virtue of Irish nature is 
saleable. When they do, we may expect the worst. 
In recent years one sad step in that direction has 
been taken by the unenlightened, hard-pressed peas- 
ant proprietary. Along the country roads, one 
meets great wagons loaded with dismembered sec- 
tions of giant oak and elm. This clearance means 
ready cash, and ready cash is more eloquent than af- 
forestation or scenery. It is a choice, perhaps, be- 
tween thinning the family or thinning the woods. 
But a country further denuded of trees will be a poor 
legacy from the present proprietors. And an ugly 
Ireland would be a dead Ireland. The beauty of 
Ireland has done a great deal to keep nationalism 
alive. One of the rewards for an Irish democracy 
will be a beautiful country where a man can actually 
keep body and soul together, and not have to save 
his body by starving his soul. 

But it is exactly because Irishmen want to live 
out their lives in their own " four beautiful green 

[ 303 ] 



fields " that they must face the realities of modern- 
ism. It is impossible for Ireland to avoid these 
realities. We are of Adam; and we shall eat the 
apple. We may say " socialism " with a Maynooth 
sneer, but we might as well sneer at streptococci. It 
is the virgin race that succumbs to a new germ. 
The race that has suffered diseases survives diseases. 
Ireland may be mediaeval, but it is the very medie- 
valism of her children that makes them easy victims 
when they enter the competitive life outside. And 
this competitive life is growing up in Ireland. If 
you were to guard the country tomorrow with walls 
of impregnable brass, the ideas of modernity would 
creep through the rivets. 

This, however, is the abstract case of positive as 
against negative virtue. More actual is Ireland's 
definite concern with the complex modern capitalistic 
state. If you wish to discover how this complexity 
is inwoven with politics all you need to do is to study 
the financial clauses of the home rule act. There 
you will find the tentacles of capitalism clasping the 
future of Ireland with all the tenderness of a hungry 
octopus. Ireland is not succulent. She is worn with 
years and misadventure. But there is a little meat 
on her bones, and capitalism does not despise her. 

THE PHILISTINE LET LOOSE 

It would be pitiful if the accent of Ireland were 
wholly changed by its economic adjustment. There 
are other accents that do not sound so well in her 
midst. It was my fortune some years ago to be 
taken by an American through part of the south of 
Ireland. We reached Cappoquin, in Waterford, on 
an evening in September. We knew there was a 

[ 304 ] 



monastery at the top of a mountain, where visitors 
could spend the night, " regardless of class, creed or 
color." My American friend wanted to see every- 
thing, so we decided to take a side-car at Cappoquin, 
and drive up the mountain road to the monastery. 

The young driver whom we had hired at the 
grocer's shop was silent without being taciturn. 
Finding him politely uncommunicative about the 
monks of Mount Melleray, I turned away from him 
to look at the country through which we were climb- 
ing. It was a soft, grey evening, an evening of 
empty peacefulness. For myself, I had had too 
much of empty peacefulness in Ireland. After ten 
years in American cities I had learned to desire a 
palpable response from the life about me, and in the 
placidity of the Irish midlands I had too often felt 
myself like a vegetable, a turnip planted in a row of 
turnips, expected to stay still forever. But after 
several days with my American friend, thirstily 
drinking up the Americanism which I had come to 
love, I now found myself able to turn back happily 
to Ireland. There she was, my enigmatic native 
land, spreading out her gifts for us under the silent 
sky, quite open and yet quite hidden. From my side 
the fields fell down into a ravine parallel with the 
road — a long, long ravine at the base of the op- 
posite hills. From our high vantage point, it 
seemed like a bed of trees in the grey evening. In 
the groove of the valley the trees were so thickly 
green that there was no hint of the earth beneath; 
and the same thick greenness covered the shoulders 
of the hills beyond. You could imagine a goblin life 
under this sea of trees, in the sweet-smelling spaces 
beneath. Or you could imagine the crash with which 

[ 305 ] 



a giant of ages beyond might lie into a bed that 
seemed so beautifully plumed as this bed of a thou- 
sand tree-tops. There was nothing empty about this 
vision of myriad trees, and it was a wealth far dif- 
ferent from that of an Adirondack valley. In some 
way deeply personal and primitive I felt intimate 
with this scene as I had never felt intimate with the 
Adirondacks. The strong horse trotted powerfully 
up the long slope. Each perch gave me a wider 
view around, and as the silent dignity of the valley 
possessed me — natural without savagery — I re- 
joiced in admitting to myself that here, without any 
effort, I felt the subtle enchantment of my own 
country. 

Even as I write now, I recall with happiness that 
sea of trees, pouring down both sides, and flowing 
down the curving valley for miles. I recall the rich 
green of the leaves, and the damp of the evening 
softly penetrating everything. The night descends 
like the soft fall of snow. Ireland rests, if she who 
has urged so many errant souls on the eternal pil- 
grimage can ever be said to rest. Rather, she folds 
her arms, and is silent. And we turn to each other 
in the loneliness that this austere land creates in the 
child of Zion. 

I wanted the New Yorker to love Ireland. When 
I turned to him I found him busy with his time- 
table. 

" Isn't it wonderful? " I asked. 

" Yes, it certainly is wonderful, wonderful ! Now, 
I guess I can make that connection, after all. Look 
here, it says I can reach Athlone tomorrow night. I 
want to see the Deserted Village, Goldsmith's De- 
serted Village. Seems an awful waste of time, 
[ 306] 



though, doesn't it! Do you think there'll be any 
ruins there? I guess not. The railway superin- 
tendent didn't seem to think so. Damn, why did we 
miss that train yesterday, anyway. We had lots of 
time, too. I hate to miss a train, it seems so 
stoopid. Doesn't it make you mad to miss a train, 
though! Gee! Wish I could read what the guide 
book says about Athlone, it's getting darned dark. 
I ought to see the Deserted Village. I want to put 
it in my book. It has circulation value, everybody's 
heard about it. Of course I needn't really go there. 
It isn't the sort of thing you have to see to write 
about. But I do like to go over the ground, pre- 
vents your making a bad break. Say, wasn't that a 
Splendid Old Keep we saw today. Nine hundred 
years old! Think of it! It was fine, fine. Gee, 
I wish I'd brought another film. Do you suppose I 
can get a picture of one of the old monks digging 
his own grave? Wouldn't that be great? Don't 
suppose they'd let me, though, do you? Is it much 
farther? Will they give us tea when we get there? 
They do, eh? That'll be fine, fine. . . . I'm begin- 
ing to get sort of scared already, aren't you? " 

This was the way the man was writing his " in- 
spirational book " about Ireland. It reminded me 
of New York restaurants, publishers' lunches, per- 
spiring waiters, call boys shouting, " Mister Am- 
brose, Mister Guggenheim, Mister Porter, Mister 
Amb — " It reminded me of the queer human breed 
that thinks you can go out and have valuable emo- 
tions to order. Is it the way to do it? Yes, if they 
only would report a single one of the real emotions 
they do have. But not if they pretend to be " in- 
spirational." 

[ 307 ] 



" Look here," said I, across the well of the car, 
" I am going to write about you, ' Get-Ireland- 
Quick.' " He was delighted, and laughed uproar- 
iously at my compliment to his " efficiency " — " Go 
ahead. It'll be fine. I'll print it in my book." 

THE HOME VARIETY 

He was in the country about a week, and to my 
great regret I had only three days with him. Dur- 
ing that time, however, we zigzagged far and wide. 
It was a flying trip, a triumph of transportation. 
We made a number of close connections in a most 
brilliant manner. And after I'd shouted goodbye 
to my brisk and cheerful companion as he waved to 
me from the Cork express, I felt as if the vital spark 
had died in my clay — I came back to my accus- 
tomed Ireland with a thud. When I returned to my 
native town everyone wanted to know about the 
handsome American. As I told them in the club of 
our dashing through three counties and of my com- 
panion's mental cinema, I could see they were 
amused. I pictured to them his alertness and " effi- 
ciency " — I told them how we'd done Lismore Castle 
in ten minutes, and driven twenty miles on a side-car 
to make up for a train we'd missed. And they 
laughed. They enjoyed the fantastic, brisk Amer- 
ican. Then the subject was dropped, and the duties 
of the evening performed. These consisted of scru- 
tinizing the winners in the paper that comes in on 
the 9:10 train; of drinking either a bottle of porter 
or a Power and soda; and of being a little bored by 
the oft-told tale of " goff." Clubs are the same 
everywhere. But in Ireland they are imprisonment. 
Miasmatic and dull, they make one homesick for 

[ 308 ] 



even the publisher's New York, the clear sun of 
New York that aerates the world and draws every- 
one and everything to the sky. 

It is this philistinism within, a caricature of every 
idyl, which gives the outside philistinism so much 
sanction. The patriot does not admit the home 
variety. He compares the best at home to the worst 
abroad. The result is distortion, and for Ireland a 
serious distortion because it rejects healthy criticism, 
it confirms insularity and provincialism. 

THE RETURNED " AMERICAN " 
One of the regular tragi-comedies of Irish life, on 
this account, is the Returned " American." Fresh 
from Chicago or Boston, the prosperous visiting 
emigrant finds himself in a strange relation to the 
old familiar life. Still a child when he left home, 
humble, timid and inexperienced, he knew nothing 
beyond his native parish, and his life was hemmed 
and subdued. Without a penny of his own, he lived 
in obedience to his father, his schoolmaster and his 
priest; and his radius was the radius of the ass's 
cart. Flung into the medley of American life he 
was compelled to struggle with giants he had never 
even conceived, to fit his senses to the mad traffic 
of a metropolis, to become way-wise in the factory, 
to learn the methods of a harsh, crass, bristling civil- 
ization. He who had thought Leitrim or Limerick 
illimitable found himself engulfed in a whirlpool of 
sensations which no one could sort or describe. His 
own people laughed at him as a " greenhorn," and 
pushed him out for himself to sink or swim. For 
the first time he earned and spent real money. He 
ate and drank what he liked. He tasted a novel in- 

[ 309 ] 



dependence. If he had an aptitude for the new life, 
he lost some of his fears, took courage in his search 
for work, found his value in the market, earned 
higher wages, broadened out. A little swaggering 
before any new "greenhorn" was inevitable; and 
when his chance to visit the " old country " arrived, 
he resolved to show the heights he had attained, the 
vast distance he had travelled, the colossal difference 
between the " greenhorn " and the Yank. 

The greatest surprise for the Returned American 
is the stationary life to which he comes home. He 
does not understand that he has himself been merely 
sucked into a whirlpool. He feels that it is he, not 
America, that has accomplished his experience; and 
he wonders that while he was so active, the people 
at home could stand still. The contrast between 
his own brilliant achievements and the unvarying rou- 
tine he had forgotten fills him with an unbidden su- 
periority. He sees in a new perspective the gods to 
whom he formerly bowed. The terrifying school- 
master is a meek, slipshod, shabby old man. The 
priest is slow-moving, amiable, asthmatic, fat, and 
obviously inexperienced. And his mother is a re- 
spectful, blushing woman, who cannot help fingering 
his clothes. The subservience of his father to the 
tradespeople and the land agent strike a nerve that 
competition has made keen. He sees no reason for 
all this self-effacement. He longs to assert himself 
against all the powers to which his childhood had 
been enslaved. He grows loud, aggressive, crude. 
He jingles his sovereigns and cocks a belligerent hat. 
He swears more than is good for him, and doesn't 
give a damn who knows it. Something tells him he 
is out of joint with the world he knew. He criti- 
[ 3io ] 



cizes, to set himself right. People sneeringly whis- 
per he thinks he's a great fellow. All he has seen, 
and been, and suffered, is locked from their eyes. 
The story of his life beyond is ignored, while yes- 
terday's weather is discussed, and the bad year for 
hay. Three thousand miles of sea lie between him- 
self and the men who say " hello." They feel he 
is proud of the contrast that his thick goid chain an- 
nounces. He's " too good for them." The words 
that should be spoken are left unspoken, and both 
take refuge in idle, rasping talk. When he goes 
back to the Chicago car-barns, he feels a strange re- 
lief. He is, in a sad sense, going home. 

But if the people in Ireland have utterly failed to 
appreciate the romance of the Returned American, 
the romance of his lonely and heroic struggle in a 
hard and unfriendly life, they, in turn, are acutely 
sensitive to the contrast he has taken pains to draw. 
He is no longer the modest, submissive boy they 
knew. He is purse-proud and vulgar. He has 
overlooked the improvements that meant labor and 
invention and pride. He has conveyed all too 
scornfully his desire to introduce changes, renovate, 
reform. They shudder at his impious hands. 
Things reverent from age and association have lost 
their value in his sharpened eyes. His religion is no 
longer the influence it was at home. New values, 
values in money and worldliness and will, have sup- 
planted the previous truths of old. He has looked 
down on them as old-fashioned and behind the times. 
He has tried to force on him crazy ideas of class 
and power. The clash between generations has been 
accentuated by the clash between the New World 
and the Old. In the parish he is remembered as a 

[3» ] 



Yank; and conservatism is ironic about this latest 
disciple of Mammon, who has splashed his money 
about with such immoral recklessness, and so boldly 
invited the anger of the gods. 

For my own part, I feel sympathy with the Old 
World in Ireland. I dread nothing for Ireland so 
much as machine-slavery, the homogeneity of vulgar 
living that is now the rule in the world and the 
economic rule in small Irish towns. But bitter as it 
is to risk Ireland's accent, I do not think that pas- 
sionate provincialism either in regard to England or 
America, can save her without confirming a worse 
decay. Ireland must season its character in the 
world as it is, not shrink away from foreignness, or 
it is destined to succumb to the world. 



T 312 J 



PART IV; 
REMEDIES 

" We are less children of this clime 
Than of some nation yet unborn 
Or empire in the womb of time. 
We hold the Ireland in the heart 
More than the land our eyes have seen, 
And love the goal for which we start 
More than the tale of what has been." 

A. E. 



XII 
HOLY POVERTY 

ECONOMIC FITNESS 

1 HE problem before Ireland today is, in short, the 
problem of survival; and the terms of survival are, 
first of all, economic fitness. Are the Irish econom- 
ically fit to survive? Without economic fitness, the 
Irish will just as certainly perish off the face of Ire- 
land as the Red Indian has perished off the face of 
Manhattan. Morally, this may seem unspeakable 
and indefensible. But many morally indefensible 
results have occurred upon this planet, the first law 
of which, neither moral nor immoral, is survival. 
He who neglects to survive may have a sound case 
against the planet; but the planet is deaf and dumb. 
" To perish may also be a solution." But if the 
Irish prefer survival to victimization, they must 
strive for economic fitness. In that strife they must 
search out those " institutional elements " of which 
Thorstein Veblen has spoken that are " at variance 
with the continued life-interests of the community." 
By the " force of their instinctive insight " they must 
prevent " the triumph of imbecile institutions over 
life and culture," whether those institutions are self- 
made, or church-made, or government-made. They 
m,ust decline to work under institutions that are 
at variance with their proper interests. They must 

[ 3i5 ] 



break the " bonds of custom, prescription, principles, 
precedent," and achieve the means of fitness and sur- 
vival. 

Modern economic civilization is only beginning to 
learn that it must not kill its wounded. Until mod- 
ern Germany applied itself to causes and effects and 
attacked the causes of poverty it was usually held that 
poverty was little better than crime. It was pun- 
ished by ignorance, disease, contumely, slavery, ex- 
termination. For Ireland it was doubly serious, be- 
cause the Irishman is unwillingly forced to compete 
with the Englishman, the worst equipped with the 
best equipped; and a vicious circle was established, in 
which the loss of an invalid sister or a dull brother 
was a relief as well as a tragedy in a warfare so 
deadly as the modern economic war. Hence, the 
modern critic bases his charges against the Irish on 
economic grounds. To drink whisky, it is pointed 
out, is an economic sin. So far as capacity is con- 
cerned, an Irishman is, so to speak, entitled to as 
much whisky as an Englishman. But for Irishmen 
to spend £15,000,000 a year on alcohol is a sin, not 
against Heaven, but against economic fitness. He 
has sinned against property! If he wishes to equal 
English extravagance in this direction, it is obviously 
his duty to increase his income. Beggars can't be 
choosers. There is one morality for the rich, an- 
other for the poor. 

Economic inferiority still entails the most far- 
reaching consequences. No one will venture to 
deny that there is one code of conduct for the poor, 
another for the rich. To discover this did not re- 
quire the adventures of Jude the Obscure. With a 
guinea a Connemara laborer can pay his year's rent. 
[ 3i6] 



That same guinea will give his landlord an opera 
ticket, or a luncheon, or a bottle of champagne. 
Were the laborer to buy a similar opera ticket — not 
a criminal indulgence in itself — he would be guilty 
of a monstrous and cruel selfishness. His " state in 
life " commits him to a life of self-denial — heroic, 
or dwarfing, as you choose to think. His oppor- 
tunities not merely for pleasure — because our 
hypocrisy as to pleasure vitiates this plea — but for 
mental development and growth are hideously 
cramped by his poverty, unless he be a genius like 
St. Francis, one of the exceptions who can compen- 
sate out of his own illimitable powers for any limita- 
tion. That such geniuses exist among the poor in 
Ireland I do not for one instant deny. Like the 
mountain ash or the edelweiss, they seem to thrive 
on hardship. Nature has taught them to convert its 
most grudging materials into things of wondrous 
beauty. Their existence is a living testimony to the 
ingenuity of the human soul, to its supreme powers, 
to the resources and hidden treasures of human 
nature. Pressure has converted them into gleaming 
and flawless spirits. But this is not an incontro- 
vertible argument for vicissitude. The bitter expe- 
rience of humanity has taught us to avoid vicissitude 
ourselves, and to desire its avoidance for others — 
except those who, like the Trappists or the Poor 
Clares, seek the spiritual snow-clad heights. To be- 
lieve in abnegation, for others, is not the mark of 
extreme spirituality: rather the reverse. Enforced 
vicissitude should generate in us what Veblen calls 
" the sentimental concern entertained by nearly all 
persons for the life and comfort of the community 
at large, and particularly for the community's future 

[ 317 ] 



welfare." To close our eyes to the destructive ab- 
negation which extreme poverty enforces is to live in 
a complacency that is spiritually not less denuded 
and cold. 

THE ESCAPE FROM LIFE 

That complacency, however, has an enormous hold 
on Ireland; and before its hold is broken Ireland 
may be destroyed. 

" Irish character is to me, being a local patriot, 
a very precious and a most beautiful thing." It is 
a Catholic bishop talking. " The tenderness of Irish 
character, the purity, the chastity, the domestic vir- 
tues of that character, are for me the sovran values 
of Irish nationality. I want to preserve them. I 
want to develop them. And so I ask for home rule. 
My ambition is that Ireland shall live in the midst 
of the nations, as it was at the beginning of its 
history, a people that places God first, a people that 
does not seek to be rich, arrogant and conquering, 
but devoted to beauty, consecrated to holiness, con- 
tent with simple things. And this does not seem to 
me a wild or an unpractical ambition. Nature, in- 
deed, has ordained that this shall be our destiny. 
We have little but our field and gardens to support 
us; our inclination is almost solely toward agricul- 
ture; we have little or no taste for the excitements 
and excesses of a civilization founded upon indus- 
trialism. We are a people who love family life and 
who believe earnestly and sincerely in the Christian 
religion. 

" I love to dream that Ireland may live isolated 
and yet in the midst of those tumultuous nations who 
are abandoned to commercialism, a place where men 
[ 3i8 ] 



may come from other lands, as it were to a retreat — 
a place where they may refresh themselves with faith 
and establish in quiet the central touch of the soul 
with God. I love to think of Ireland peopled by 
a humble and satisfied humanity, the villages extend- 
ing through the valleys, the towns never out of con- 
tact with the fields, the cities famous for learning 
and piety, the whole nation using life for its greatest 
end, its ultimate and eternal purpose. It would 
surely be a good thing for the British empire to have 
such a sanctuary at its heart. Might not such an 
Ireland be of service to England, if only in reminding 
your democracy that no wages can buy happiness? 
Are you not in some danger in this respect? 

" Have I made you feel, have I convinced you, 
that the Irish question is a spiritual question, a re- 
ligious question? Our movement in its soul is that, 
nothing but that. We do not believe in the strife of 
industrialism. We do not believe in the struggle 
for existence. We seek to disengage ourselves from 
all that strife and struggle, into which the union has 
dragged us, in order that we may follow our own 
way, which is quiet, simple, and modest. We are 
quite certain that materialism is wrong. What is 
more important, we are quite certain that idealism is 
right. We make the conscious choice of beauty and 
peace, rather than ugliness and contention. We de- 
liberately elect for God, and as deliberately we reject 
Mammon. 

" Under the union we are dragged against our will, 
we a poor and simple agricultural people, into the 
roaring machinery and the extravagant organization 
of a rich, complex and industrial civilization. The 
more you bear our burdens, the more your paralyze 

[ 3i9 ] 



our sense of responsibility. The more you advance 
along your difficult road, the more you drag us from 
our firesides and our fields. We do not desire a 
complex civilization. We do not want to be sophis- 
ticated. We dislike and we suspect the elaborate 
machinery of your social life. We say to you Set 
us free : leave us to pursue our own path, to fulfil our 
own destiny. . . . 

" My dream is the aspiration of the Irish people." 

MAMMON 

These precious words were absorbed by Mr. 
Harold Begbie, to be published as The Bishop's 
Dream in that well-meant contribution to Ireland's 
sorrows, The Happy Irish. The little Irish bishop, 
Mr. Begbie tells us, rolled out his mind in this 
manner after the housekeeper was sent to bed. We 
are given to see the little bishop's " red face wreathed 
with smiles, his small, deep-sunken eyes bright with 
animation, his large mouth cheerful with good- 
humour." And we are informed that he is " a very 
remarkable Roman Catholic bishop," brilliant, en- 
gaging and famous, who believes that " by its delib- 
erate choice a nation may walk quietly towards 
God." 

If Irishwomen are chaste, Irishmen tender and 
pure, it is a superiority in which we are becomingly 
humble. Other nations may be " abandoned " to 
commercialism, rich, arrogant and conquering. The 
Irish seek to be " devoted to beauty, consecrated to 
holiness, content with simple things." We cannot 
help it. It is our destiny. We are quite certain 
that materialism is wrong. We are quite certain that 
idealism is right. We elect for God. We reject 

[ 320 ] 



Mammon, " an old-fashioned people, following in 
the footsteps of its ancestors." 

Nothing is more dangerous in Ireland than this 
adulation of Irishmen, this attempt to portray them 
as a consecrated people. It is, I know, the faith that 
inspired a number of the insurrectionists of 191 6. 
" The Gael is, in the fullest sense of the word, an 
idealist." So Padraic Pearse declared as early as 
1898. And, with an unconscious adoption of a cor- 
rosive phrase, he said, " The Gael is not like other 
men; the spade, and the loom, and the sword are not 
for him. But a destiny more glorious than that of 
Rome, more glorious than that of Britain awaits him,: 
to become the savior of idealism in modern intellec- 
tual and social life, the regenerator and rejuvenator 
of the literature of the world, the instructor of the 
nations, the preacher of the gospel of nature-worship, 
hero-worship, God-worship, such, Mr. Chairman, is 
the destiny of the Gael." 

The explanation of this ideality is to be found, I 
believe, in the uninspired surroundings of Pearse's 
youth. " Who can look at our political and na- 
tional life at the present moment, and continue to 
hope? The men whom we call our leaders are en- 
gaged in tearing out one another's vitals, and there 
is no prospect they will ever stop." But his gospel, 
none the less, was a gospel with peculiar danger in 
it, a gospel of escape from life. 

In taking to the "sword," seventeen years later, 
Pearse did what he believed best to serve " all that is 
beautiful, noble, true." Rising magnificently out of 
a squalid epoch, the men of 19 16 returned national 
aspiration to the people of Ireland. But, to be 
valid, national aspiration must do more than execrate 

[ 321 ] 



" the imbecile institutions " of life and culture. It 
must have institutions of its own, less imbecile, to 
carry on the nation. And it is here that the anti- 
materialist has failed his people. He has failed the 
people simply by not recognizing that, since poverty 
was and is the fundamental handicap of Ireland, 
Ireland is forced, first of all, to face the world-wide 
problem of abolishing poverty. 

THE DANCE OF DEATH 

Against this conclusion the priests, the politicians, 
the romantics and the idyllists have fought and are 
fighting hard. It is natural for the propertied classes 
everywhere to veil the hideous realism of poverty. 
But in Ireland there has been a nation-wide Irish 
conspiracy against economic emancipation. No man 
cares to acknowledge he has a deadly disease. No 
man cares to own he has a fatal weakness. A thou- 
sand excuses will be invented for postponing the diag- 
noses and the surgeon, the confession and the long 
up-hill fight. But it is absolutely useless to enamel 
sunken cheeks and brighten deadened eyes. For a 
hundred years Ireland has been rotting with poverty. 
It has every vice, every cowardice, every ignorance, 
every insularity, that poverty favors and condones. 
They talk about " the happy Irish." Ireland has 
been insane with unhappiness. From the slums of 
Belfast to the agrarian slums of Kerry, from the in- 
hospitable rocks of Donegal to the treeless forelands 
of Wexford, it has been calm with the heavy calm- 
ness of a sick-room and dreamy with the dreaminess 
of privation and decay. There are islands in its 
dead sea, springs in its desert. The European war 
has given it high prices for agricultural products and 
[ 322 ] 



much ready cash. But there is scarcely a farmhouse, 
and not one solitary southern or northern town, that 
has not had poverty as its silent, voracious guest for 
a hundred years. Poverty has been quartered on the 
people like a foreign soldiery. It has had the first 
claim on health, the first claim on vitality, the first 
claim on ambition, the first claim on income. Day 
by day it has conducted the finest sons to the emigra- 
tion port. Day by day it has escorted the old to the 
poorhouse. The people fear it as they fear the 
plague. They starve themselves to keep from starv- 
ing. They stint their growth, their comfort, their 
necessity. They contract loveless marriages, they 
endure tyrannical relatives, they accept and inflict in- 
dignities, to escape its skeleton embrace. Poverty 
has sat in sardonic censorship on art and literature 
and science. It has dwarfed art. It has thinned 
literature. It has precluded science. It has locked 
the nineteenth century out of Ireland. It has kept 
a beautiful country in wet and squalid rags. It has 
imprisoned Catholic Ireland in ugly and joyless 
homes. It has deprived humanity of a brilliant na- 
tional contribution. It has greeted with slim laugh- 
ter the maunderings of Daniel O'Connell about Re- 
peal, and the frenzies of the Fenians about sep- 
aration. The handsome landed gentry have kept 
quiet about their hungry ally. The fat Catholic 
church has said nothing about him. The pig-eyed 
publican has splashed a tear about poverty, and 
scraped £15,000,000 into his greasy till. The 
shrewd little solicitor has bemoaned him, and levied 
tribute. The gombeen man has not betrayed his 
silent partner, nor has the National school-teacher 
given away the taskmaster who makes him lean and 

[ 323 ] 



incompetent and dull. Inside Ireland itself, there is 
nothing to declare that Poverty is king. It is only 
when one returns from affluent lands that one walks 
the roads of Ireland to behold poverty. Sir Charles 
Cameron says that when he was a young man Dublin 
was hideous with the victims of small-pox. Today 
Ireland is hideous with poverty, pitted and scarred 
with it, repulsive with it, unclean with it, and, until 
poverty is abolished, that beautiful country will be 
peopled with the victims of poverty — scarred, re- 
pulsive and unclean. 

MATERIALISM 

I believe in materialism. I believe the one hope 
for Ireland is a healthy materialism. I believe in all 
the proceeds of a healthy materialism — good cook- 
ing, dry houses, dry feet, sewers, drain-pipes, hot 
water, baths, electric light, automobiles, good roads, 
bright streets, long vacations away from the village 
pump, new ideas, fast horses, swift conversation, 
theatres, operas, orchestras, bands — I believe, in 
short, in practically everything which (except the 
horses) is now the exclusive perquisite of the Anglo- 
Irish parasites. I believe in them all, for everybody. 
The man who dies without knowing these things may 
be as exquisite as a saint, and as rich as a poet; but 
it is in spite, not because, of his deprivation. The 
poets and saints have decried these things. They 
have revered the peasant bowed with honest toil. 
They have saluted the farmhouse madonna looking 
on her herded sheep with pure and starry eyes. But 
it has been my misfortune to see that same honest 
peasant drunk on fusil whisky, to see that same ma- 
donna spitting tuberculous blood. When the ma- 
[ 324 ] 



donna has a baby, there is a definite chance that she 
will feed the baby tea out of a milk-bottle, and there 
is almost a certainty that the milk-bottle will have a 
dirty nipple. Not many of your poets write poems 
about dirty milk-bottles. The Saints, for that mat- 
ter, are adopted by the leisure class, for the simple 
reason that the other class cannot afford to label their 
saints. Materialism is, of course, denounced in the 
drawing-room. It is usual to hear ladies pause 
over terrapin to become rapturous about the Simple 
Life. But it is only a frost-bitten genius like 
Thoreau who really samples the Simple Life. 
(Thoreau died of tuberculosis at 44.) There is 
no necessity to make life any simpler than it has 
to be for a moderately honest man. The real thing 
is to complicate it — complicate it with refinement, 
sensitiveness, ascending effort and extending choice. 
For cows, even, life may be too simple. There is 
nothing simple about the environment of a £1000 
cow. What is good for a cow is not too good for a 
child, woman or man. What I should like is to see 
the Irish people put on a plane within hailing dis- 
tance of the plane of pedigree cattle. The ambition 
is too high, at present, but it is my wildest dream for 
the democracy of Ireland. 

While there is no alliance between virtue and 
wealth, there is equally no alliance between virtue 
and poverty. Epictetus was a slave. Aurelius was 
an emperor. If commercialism were the only es- 
cape from poverty, I should prefer Ireland a slat- 
tern to Ireland a worldling. What confronts us, 
however, is no such academic alternative. The pov- 
erty of Ireland is today the very agent of commer- 
cialism. Commercialism does not despise the poor. 

[ 325 ] 



Commercialism gets far bigger profits out of the 
poor than out of the rich. Commercialism tenderly 
loves the poor. And the commercialism of Eng- 
land is at the present hour vulgarising Ireland from 
Dublin to Bundoran in the north and to Cahirciveen 
in the south. It is hard to contaminate springwater. 
The agricultural life is marvelously disinfectant. 
But the taste for novelty is insidious. A capitalized 
foreign culture, however inferior, can compete with 
a poor homespun culture, however lovely. Unless 
Ireland pays for its own culture, it will soon take 
what the poor get everywhere, the " seconds," the 
" thirds," of the culture concocted by Lord North- 
cliffe. Ireland will have to pay as well as England 
for Northcliffe's discovery that there is a large profit 
in a homogeneity of bad taste. 

To make Ireland prosperous without making her 
meretricious — that is the first problem of Irish 
statesmanship. 

THE SINN FEIN POLICY 

It is here that the Catholic church, the Irish 
parliamentary party and the Sinn Feiners have failed 
to save Ireland and have played into the hands of 
Ulster. In 1905, it is perfectly true, Mr. Arthur 
Griffith enunciated an economic programme, " the 
' Sinn Fein ' policy," covering Irish education, Irish 
industries, Irish capital, the merchant marine, for- 
eign trade, transit, banking. But the attack he made 
on English political economy in favor of Frederick 
List was sublimated by later Sinn Feiners into an 
attack on all political economy. " Political economy 
was invented, not by Adam Smith, but by the devil. 
Be certain that in political economy there is no Way 
[ 326] 



of Life either for a man or for a people. Life for 
both is a matter, not of conflicting tariffs, but of 
conflicting powers of good and evil; and what have 
Ricardo and Malthus and Stuart Mill to teach about 
this? " Here the escape from life was glorified by 
the cry, " Ye men and peoples, burn your books on 
rent theories and land values, and go back to your 
sagas." This was not at all what Arthur Griffith 
designed. He believed with List, " Only in the soil 
of general prosperity does the national spirit strike 
its root, produce fine blossoms and rich fruits — only 
from the unity of material interests does mental 
power arise and again from both of them national 
power." This was a frontal attack on the enormous 
problem, and had Britain been on a level with 
Austria, Ireland might have emulated Hungary. 
But the ingredient of battle in Arthur Griffith's 
composition was not as effectual as in Parnell's. 

In the House of Commons Parnell had what 
Griffith lacked — a contact with the enemy. Where 
Parnell could injure, Griffith could only fulminate. 
It was indisputable that Great Britain's share of 
total trade was 98.3 to Ireland's 1.7, but the remedy 
of sending Irishmen to act as consuls in foreign 
countries^ was too heroic a remedy. It gave a na- 
tion without capital no fulcrum. The only fulcrum 
practicable in Ireland was the agricultural. What 
Denmark has done Ireland could do, and more. 
But Mr. Arthur Griffith had in him something of 
that lofty intransigence which declines to make terms 
with society as it is. The tragedy of Ireland had 
made him vengeful as well as sorrowful. His pride 
demanded a popular consecration, a spirit in regard 
to England that had in it the scorn of Swift, the stiff 

[ 327 ] 



neck of John Mitchel, the serpent wisdom of 
Nietzsche. When one thinks of the respectable 
English statesman — Campbell Bannerman, for in- 
stance — this pure rage seems like using hell-fire to 
boil a kettle. It was not in Mr. Griffith, as some 
might infer, to " hatch basilisk's eggs, and weave 
the spider's web." A more honorable being, as I 
conceive him, could not be discovered. But he loved 
his ideal of Sinn Fein jealously. He would not 
recognize in existing agricultural Ireland the fulcrum 
that was to be found there. He preferred to flash 
lightning from his heights. The result, ten years 
after the policy was enunciated, was by no means 
the splendid particularism that he had intended. 
Irish-American capital was no more captivated than 
before. The canals of Ireland were still sluggard. 
The consulates were still British. The Irish stock 
exchange was still a puny government agency. The 
merchant marine was still non-existent. Whatever 
improvements had come in university education had 
come by the aid of the state. But the shining anger 
of Arthur Griffith had fascinated the best youth of 
Ireland, and England had justified that anger in a 
hundred ways. Mr. Walter Long had filched the 
fees that were to reward the study of Gaelic. The 
Liberals had done their best to shelve the issue of 
home rule. Mr. Asquith and Mr. Churchill and 
Lord Loreburn had trimmed and shilly-shallied. 
Backed by the army, Sir Edward Carson had woven 
himself in and out of " treasonable conspiracy " as 
if it were a matter for ingenious legalism, like in- 
troducing just the right proportion of smut into one 
of the fashionable divorce cases. The English 
political prima donnas had sung God Save Ireland 

[328 ] 



when the war came, but it was not long after Queens- 
town harbor had been boycotted by the Cunard line 
and it was only a fortnight after British troops had 
shot into a crowd of unarmed Dublin citizens, and 
gone free. The police official who had called out 
the military was, indeed, got rid of, but the govern- 
ment took him back elsewhere in a little while. And 
the police thereafter were kept on the heels of every 
critic of England. So shabby were the govern- 
mental evasions, the extenuations, so silly the at- 
tempts to beguile and to hoodwink, that the finest na- 
tive Irishmen sickened of English government and 
had no stomach for the war. Sinn Fein became un- 
compromising by processes absolutely open to the 
casual eye. Drop by drop English mismanagement 
loaded the mixture for explosion. And explosion 
was all the more inevitable because the parliamen- 
tarians had never once dealt with the rich impulses 
back of separatistic Sinn Fein. 

Except for James Connolly's contingent, the rebels 
of 19 1 6 had little economic preoccupation. There 
was nothing in the lofty nationalism of the insur- 
rection to show that poverty was regarded as a 
corroding national evil, or that a new attitude toward 
poverty is essential to national welfare. 

THE REVOLUTIONISTS 

It is important, in considering Arthur Griffith 
and the economic policy which he matured on paper, 
to realize that his antagonism to England is really 
a sort of individualist antagonism. Like Mitchel 
and Parnell, Arthur Griffith stands outside the move- 
ment of the whole people. The Irish patriot, John 
Mitchel, differed in idiom from the English repub- 

[ 329 ] 



lican, John Milton, but it was quite consistent with 
Milton's one-sidedness that in the end Mitchel 
should have been found upholding the slave-owners 
in the Civil War. John Mitchel did not wear God 
on his banner, but he was essentially a militant 
crusader. Born in Ireland, he resented the oligar- 
chic pretensions of England, but he resented them 
as an encroachment upon his own conscience and 
character. He was an intense individualist, insus- 
ceptible to democratic moralism. He never shared 
the ordinary democratic conceptions of equality, jus- 
tice and indulgence. He hated the ideas of central- 
ization, compromise and " progress." He had the 
pride, the sophistication, the capacity for scorn and 
hatred that go with intense individualism, and he 
despised the flexibility and impartiality of men like 
Mazzini. Humanitarianism was for him an in- 
vertebrate and nerveless creed. Big-hearted and 
responsive, he invincibly resisted the deflection of 
his own elected purposes. In regard to these, he 
was a man of blood-and-steel, private-spirited rather 
than public-spirited, akin to the aristocrat and the 
conservative. 

Similarly private-spirited was Parnell. It was 
absolutely consistent for Parnell to assert his per- 
sonal passion against the will of the compact major- 
ity. Accident made him a parliamentarian, but he 
was a cold-blooded tactician, amenable to liberal con- 
siderations but utterly immune from liberal sympa- 
thies. The romantic notion of the " brotherhood of 
man " disgusted Parnell. He sought, like John 
Mitchel, to establish in Ireland a constitution that 
would give to his own nature its fullest possible 
scope. The indecency and indignity of personal 
[ 330 ] 



subjection rowelled Parnell like a spur with teeth 
in it. But if other men did not equally resent sub- 
jection, so much the worse for them. He was em- 
phatically not his brother's keeper. Like Mitchel, 
he was magnanimous, and compassionate of the 
Irish barbarians. But when it came to a choice be- 
tween those barbarians and the rights of his private 
spirit he renounced them as he would have renounced 
cattle. Of his own nature, Himself, he owed them 
nothing. For him, as for Mitchel, the struggle of 
life was essentially competitive. In the competition 
he went far enough out of himself to identify him- 
self with his nation. But he neither aimed nor de- 
sired to transcend these limits, nor did he seek for 
one moment to alter the competitive struggle. He 
believed that Gladstone's aims were equally com- 
petitive, only emollient and sweet in method. He 
preferred to interpret him as a competitor working 
hypocritically to interpreting him as a cooperator 
working humanely. It was inconceivable to Parnell 
that one could submit any fundamental desire to the 
ratification of a conference. One might as well in- 
vite a committee to select one's wife. 

So with Mr. Griffith. A voice crying in the 
wilderness, he has carried his wilderness with him. 
The economics of Ireland were secondary to his 
hatred of England, stones of wrath in a Ulysses bat- 
tle against the Manchesterian Cyclops. 

THE PARLIAMENTARIANS 

The parliamentary party never had a genuine 
economic policy, outside land purchase. Its one am- 
bition was to haggle for and to boast about state aid. 
It got very little state aid, all things considered, but 

[ 33i ] 



it made the most of it whenever it recounted its 
achievements. The party too often came back from 
Westminster as if returning from a foray on the 
treasury. It translated Irish politics into the lan- 
guage of the pork-barrel. This was the dominant 
element in its economic policy. Above and beyond 
there was nothing to lift up Ireland. It had no 
creative scheme. 

" The fifth object of the Land and National 
Leagues," says the 19 15 report of the United Irish 
League, " was the development and the encourage- 
ment of the labor and industrial interests of Ire- 
land. ... In season and out of season, in parlia- 
ment and in the country, the Irish party has been 
unceasing in its efforts to develop and to encourage 
Irish labor and industrial interests. ... It has, by 
every means at its command, endeavored to encour- 
age and to foster Irish arts, industries, and manu- 
factures, to create a home market for Irish produce, 
and to facilitate in every way the development of 
Irish trade and commerce, both at home and abroad, 
and in this way it has laid the foundation for a 
great industrial future for our country under the 
fostering care of the new Irish parliament." 

There is not a great deal to be said about this 
eloquence. 

When an Irishman goes afield he soon meets the 
ecstatic lady who asks: " Oh, do you really believe 
in fairies? " If he has eaten of the tree of knowl- 
edge, he regards her with an evil eye. It would be 
a strange thing if that same Irishman, sane and 
sceptical to the core, had found the fairies out merely 
to take the fakirs in. Instead of feeling credulity 
about the truly magic world, as befits an Irishman, 

[ 332 ] 



has he begun to invest with magic the things that 
are hollow and vain? He is no longer wistful about 
his crock of gold. Is he wistfulness itself about 
an imaginary act of a hypothetical parliament? 
The myths of the sun and stars are an empty tale. 
Are the myths of Westminster as gospel? Are the 
" good people " M.Ps with pot bellies? 

If Irishmen are to know the real world, the world 
of cause and effect, they had better revive the faith 
in fairies. It is bad to repress myth-making in the 
fields if it is going to survive on the platforms. 

WHY ULSTER DOUBTS 

But the attitude of Ulster, in this regard, is too 
ferociously unfriendly. Where the failure of the 
Irish parliamentary party has been principally due 
to its agrarian preoccupations, the Ulster manufac- 
turer has set it down to wild and nefarious greed. 
A chorus of powerful protest arose in Ulster when 
the home rule bill was drafted. One vocal manu- 
facturer assaulted the bill partly because " the pro- 
visions of the bill have been designed to enable the 
non-manufacturing interests to penalize and finan- 
cially bleed the manufacturing interests of Ireland " 
and partly because " those sentimentally good people 
in Great Britain who want to force home rule upon 
us may have in their minds the idea that their own 
competitive business interests in Great Britain would 
gain by having the manufacturing industries of Ire- 
land completely destroyed, and more especially the 
flourishing ones of Ulster; but, of course, on the 
other hand, there are those who find in Ireland, and 
in Ulster in particular, good customers for their 
wares." 

[ 333 ] 



These arguments deal with evil intentions rather 
than evil acts; they have their counterpart in the 
stout Republicanism of Pennsylvania discoursing on 
the hay-seediness of the Democrats from Jefferson 
down. The only possible answer is psychological. 
" I can conceive no task I should enter upon with 
greater confidence of success," said Sir Horace 
Plunkett in July, 1914, "than organizing a move- 
ment in agricultural Ireland for making the people 
understand the duty and wisdom of meeting every 
reasonable demand of the industrial classes for ev- 
ery facility and protection they need in the building 
up of their side of the national life." 

Sir Horace Plunkett's answer is vitally important. 
No one, as I have shown, was less sentimentally il- 
luded about the southern Irishman than he himself 
in his book in 1904. After ten years' further ex- 
perience of rural Ireland and a full study of the co- 
operative movement and the department of agri- 
culture he testified unreservedly in their favor in 
19 14. Of the department of agriculture he de- 
clared: "I do claim, and I believe every Ulster- 
man acquainted with its working will acknowledge, 
that this body, controlled in its working by a ma- 
jority of Southern Irishmen, has behaved, on the 
whole, with justice and intelligence. Good feeling 
and good sense are the main qualities required to 
make home rule work, and to prevent damage to 
the business interests of any part of the country. 
The Southern Irish have displayed these qualities 
conspicuously in the management of the two great 
organizations covering the whole country; is there 
any reason to believe that they will not display them 
again if the opportunity is offered? " 
[ 334 ] 



Plain lack of acquaintanceship, unfortunately, has 
a good deal to do with Ulster's scepticism. In spite 
of the powerful bourgeois element in Belfast, the 
aristocratic idea of Paddie and Paddie's pig is still 
accepted in business circles; and business retains an 
impression, refreshed by the A. O. H., of political 
cliques that keep alive the old unrest of Fenianism 
and agrarian jacqueries. 

Too many people have taken their idea of the 
Irish peasant proprietor from the Anglo-Irish land- 
lord, the Anglo-Irish humorist, the London Times 
and Punch. Although Ulster does not know it, Pad- 
die was largely the invention of a class that lived by 
the sweat of Paddie's brow. He is the landlord's 
Paddie, the Paddie of whom anecdotes are told in 
the country-house, the home of the Island Pharisees. 
When the "peasant" (delightful word) revolts 
against a love that is conditioned on submissiveness, 
he is reproached as insolent, impudent and imperti- 
nent. Those words are still on the lips of Irish 
gentlefolk. They are on the lips of the parvenus 
as well as the " old stock." They typify the ex- 
pectations of the feudal. And they provoke in hot- 
blooded youth, emigrant or non-emigrant, a self- 
assertion which is the declaration of class-hatred and 
class-war. It is significant that government officials, 
professional men and sometimes priests — though 
these rarely — look for signs that a man " knows his 
place." One even hears of the squireen slashing the 
awkward fellow who does not get out of his way. 
The submissiveness of the people, as distinguished 
from their courtesy, is still apparent to anyone who 
has motored through the country. Hundreds of the 
country people salute the strangers who go rolling 

[ 335 ] 



by in this chariot of class. And yet there are 
" peasants " who writhe at servility. The County 
Clare is not servile. Neither, for that matter, 
is the long Anglicized Queen's County. By the 
Rock of Dunamase I once chatted with a spare, 
elderly man who had " travelled the world," and 
I asked him how he had liked working in murky 
Liverpool, compared with this beautiful domain. 
" I liked it well." " How so? " " Ah, there was 
no salaaming over there." 

AN ECONOMIC PROGRAMME 

In the cooperative movement rural Ireland has 
begun to apply a true programme of economic de- 
mocracy, cleanly independent of the state, and the 
development of this programme is the one big hope 
of the future. 

In capitalizing the Irish tenants, the government 
has abolished landlordism, but in substituting a big 
number of small proprietors for a small number of 
big landlords, it has not prevented the possibility of 
proprietorship turning into landlordism again. No 
one can deny that proprietorship tends to turn into 
landlordism. In the United States the number of 
tenants — though principally share tenants — is in- 
creasing. In the State of Ohio, for example, there 
were actually fewer farms operated by owners in 
19 10 than there were in 1880. But the number of 
tenants nearly doubled. It rose from 47,627 to 
77,188. With this tendency, and its effect on democ- 
racy, the advocate of peasant proprietorship must 
be prepared to deal. It opens up, on a new side, 
the old problem of property and parasitism; and a 
parasitism, too, which has nothing to do with the 

[ 336] 



rightful dependence of very young and very old 
people, and people consecrated to non-lucrative ac- 
tivity. 

But more immediate is the social effect of pro- 
prietorship on men who before had no stake in the 
commonwealth. It is now supposed that because 
this stake is a personal one, the peasant proprietary 
will become inordinately and sordidly conservative. 
Their lives were overshadowed before by the neces- 
sity of paying rent. If they failed in this respect, 
however, they lost no security. Now their annual 
obligation is personally serious. They are bound 
to their vocation by the clearest self-interest. 

According to one kind of economist, self-interest 
is the foundation of all utility. But no one who has 
observed the pusillanimity of the Irish railroads can 
quite believe that. There is such a thing as capital- 
izing the worm in human nature, rewarding solvency 
at the expense of creativeness. Solvency is the aim 
of small proprietorship. There remains the ques- 
tion of creativeness. 

With a peasant proprietary established, there is 
only one policy which saves it from narrow and 
grinding conservatism. That is the policy advo- 
cated and promoted by Sir Horace Plunkett, co- 
operation. Cooperation is creativeness. It is the 
one order of creativeness consistent with agricul- 
tural private property. It is the one social method 
that will keep the proprietors from becoming futile 
islanders, little custodians of self-interest living in 
a state of armed neutrality with the world. All the 
fine qualities that are submerged in men whose wealth 
consists in agricultural rather than human relations 
— defensive wealth, wealth ensuring parasitism — 

[ 337 ] 



have a chance in cooperation. Cooperation is the 
only alternative to predatory activity in agricultural 
Ireland. It is the only policy that brings to the 
peasant proprietor that emancipation of which own- 
ership is a single element. It is the only policy that 
elicits his full citizenship. Otherwise, he will con- 
centrate on the chances of jealously personal advan- 
tage. Preserving his insularity and ignorance, he 
will acquire money by those courses in which one 
is strengthened but also brutalized. He will 
achieve power, but it will be derived from things en- 
slaved, not things enriched. And his only fraternal 
associates will be the dogs who don't eat dogs like 
himself. 

There is nothing idyllic in cooperation, but out 
of it promises to come a civilized rural life; and 
with rural prosperity Ireland will doubly need this 
trellis-work of civilization. There are already 
thousands of Irish philistines to whom life offers 
no national sense whatever, and who find their 
heart's desire not in the poet's Isles of the Blest, 
but in the bank clerk's Isle of Man. Between the 
romanticism that employs trite and theatrical images, 
and the philistinism that has no images outside of 
moving pictures, there is an Ireland with as con- 
siderable an opportunity of civilization as any na- 
tion on earth. Harsh as the history of Ireland has 
been, vulgar or discouraged as much of its life is 
today, it remains a country with the finest possi- 
bilities of vital and noble existence. The word 
" noble " may, if you like, be taken as negligible 
rhetoric. But unless Ireland fortifies the institu- 
tions that safeguard nobility it is certain to become 
a squalid annex to commercialized England, a back 
[ 338 ] 



lot for raising English butcher's meat and army re- 
mounts, with a few " beauty spots " for the delecta- 
tion of tripsters. 

In Ireland itself there are hundreds of its clever- 
est men hurrying the country in this vulgarization 
and ineptitude. They are doing it unconsciously. 
They have caught the contagion of commercialism, 
and they succumb to it, as savages to whisky. To 
build a moral breakwater against such inundation 
is a futile proceeding. It is like the attempt of 
Vigilance Committees to keep the youth of Ireland 
pure by effort of the will. The salvation of Ire- 
land cannot be effected just by moral propaganda. 
The country cannot be treated as a prostrate and 
inert mass, to be supported by props and cushions. 
By works as well as faith must it be saved, by or- 
ganization that defeats profiteering and frees men 
from subjection to profiteers. And cooperation, as 
the north star of Ireland — George Russell — has 
so truly and invariably and pitilessly indicated, is the 
principle by which rural Ireland may hope to be 
immortally as well as mortally saved. 

THE ENEMY OF IRELAND 
The organized attack on poverty must be reckoned 
the first step in liberating Ireland. The evil of 
poverty is not hardship. In the life of a soldier, 
an explorer or even a captain of industry, there 
may be far greater hardships than afflict the poor. 
What makes poverty evil is the powerlessness to 
which its victims are subject. In a natural environ- 
ment man is enslaved by weakness. Unless the 
weak man receives aid to compensate for his limita- 
tions, he is forced under, kept under, and destroyed. 

[ 339 ] 



The competitive habit selects strong and cunning 
men to dominate those who are less strong and less 
cunning, and to struggle among each other for the 
rewards of leadership. But in this penalization of 
weakness there is a crude natural justice. Where 
nature has already marked the weak for extermina- 
tion, extermination does not vitiate the race. 

But in an artificial environment poverty is a 
synonym for penalty. During the helplessness of 
infancy, the poor are not merely inflicted with hard- 
ship. They are marred for life. Compared with 
the child whose nurture is capitalized during the 
helpless years, the child of the poor is doomed. 
In spite of famous exceptions, the child of the poor 
is handicapped out of the race from the start. Com- 
ing potential from his mother's womb, he stands far 
less chance of actual survival. If he does survive, 
he survives with an inferior organism. Poverty 
has affected his powers of resistance, his stamina 
and his capacity. It has put him at the wrong end 
of the horn of plenty, from which he must extract 
what he needs with ferocious hands; but also it has 
taught him hopelessness and resignation, and given 
him a body to confirm the lesson. 

According to the law of competition, this degraded 
human being must take his chances with the children 
of the capitalized. Here poverty is perpetuated. 
Against well-nurtured children, children whose famil- 
ies have at their command the resources of an arti- 
ficial environment, the ill-nurtured children have not 
an equal chance. Neither group is immune from 
mistakes or self-destructive vice. But in the case of 
the capitalized, mistakes and self-indulgence are less 

[ 340 ] 



harmful because their class has the power to com- 
mute. If they fall, they fall into a protective net. 
If the poor fall, on the contrary, their class is in- 
finitely less powerful to forestall the punishment of 
society. There is one law for the rich, another for 
the poor, only because property is able to qualify 
the law. Everyone who is poor or who knows the 
poor knows their tendency to succor, to console and 
to condone. But their organization is loose and 
ineffectual. Time, the time that allows for recup- 
eration, is their enemy. Their defalcation is regis- 
tered as soon as it is committed, their credit is mor- 
ally short, their rate of interest high. Theirs is a 
narrow road where a false step means a loss, not 
of luxury and comfort, but raiment, shelter and 
food. Their margin demands a standard of con- 
duct inversely proportioned to their income. If pov- 
erty ceases to be holy, it is branded vicious overnight. 
This is the reason why the poor make up the great 
majority of the criminal classes. They are huddled 
together on a restive island of needs, surrounded by 
a sea of temptations which is peopled by the sharks 
of the law. 

It is not any special love of the poor that makes 
the democrat wish to see this changed. It is his 
hatred of the waste of life. Men talk of healthy 
competition. There is a competition that is un- 
* healthy to the depths of infamy. Our life is possi- 
bly a mere journey from one eternal darkness to 
another. We may be mere spawn of the earth, and 
our religions a cosmic fable, but whether we adopt 
the material or the mystical version of experience, 
we surely unite in revolting against the factors that 

[ 341 ] 



defeat the will to live. Poverty is undesirable in 
proportion as it defeats this will to live; and it is 
evil in proportion as it is unnecessary. That it is 
unnecessary, more the result of culpable selfishness 
than culpable weakness, is the inspiration of all so- 
cial reform. 

The particularism of Ulster is one item in the 
fight on poverty. The particularism of the employer 
and the middleman is another. Irish labor is still 
an infant too weak to stand by itself, the victim of 
every provincialism and ignorance, the bullied serv- 
ant of stupid urban life. When the dreamers of 
Ireland A Civilization give up the fight on poverty, 
the practical and immediate fight on it, they throw 
away the irreplaceable resources of Ireland. They 
pursue a mirage of independence, they leave their 
country open to the worst imperialist of all. 



[ 342 I 



XIII 
MANUMISSION 

THE EMPIRE HAS FAILED 

IT is bitter for the English to admit their continued 
failure in Ireland. Every art and craft that is 
known to patient and resourceful administrators has 
been utilized in dealing with the Irish, and time after 
time, when the administrators have attempted to rely 
on it, the structure has crumbled under their hands. 
Men from Oxford and Cambridge have been given 
preference in the constabulary, men who have suc- 
ceeded in India have been imported to the Castle, 
the best kind of government servants have been made 
resident magistrates and commissioners and judges 
and yet the integrity and squareness and reticent dig- 
nity which have worked so well elsewhere have no 
principle of life in them for the Irish people. The 
English government has tried everything. Some- 
times it has adopted the most enlightened methods, 
sometimes the most disgraceful. If bribery and cor- 
ruption could advance Pitt's programme they were 
extravagantly employed. If compliance with the 
Catholic church seemed to promise a control over the 
people the Catholic church was sought in consulta- 
tion. If the suppression of group action or the dis- 
carding of trial by jury or the simple expedient of 
deportation appeared to favor English purposes, the 
English government readily stooped to conquer. 

[ 343 ] 



There is nothing of Cossack severity, at one extreme, 
or of absurd yielding to strong local sentiment, at the 
other, that is not to be found in the last century of 
governmental record — the last four years, for that 
matter — and yet the outcome of all this pliancy and 
subtlety, accompanied by measures of legislation 
often wholly admirable, has been a continuous and 
even fatuous failure. The settlement of land tenure, 
local self-government, the national university and the 
popular department of agriculture do lift themselves 
above fatuity and offer a solid footing for mutual 
satisfaction. The rest is a moral quagmire. It has 
given England a notoriety throughout the world. 
The Germans try to lisp in Gaelic, for the edification 
of the disaffected Dubliner. Trotzky meets the 
good offices of Englishmen with a satiric inquiry, 
" How about Ireland? " The nationalistic Hindu 
does not forget it. Neither do thousands of de- 
tached observers who are no allies of Hindu or 
Russian or German. Whatever may be said to ex- 
tenuate the failure or to fix the blame for it, the one 
thing undeniable is the moral insolvency of the em- 
pire in Ireland. " No, my Lords," as the Marquess 
of Crewe told the upper house in 19 13, " Ireland — 
by whose fault does not matter — has never become 
an integral part of Britain; her government has in 
essence remained a colonial government." 

This insolvency has been exposed to the world 
during the world war. In a struggle affecting the 
destiny of hundreds of millions it has obtruded itself 
continually. Because its importance is a moral one 
it has asserted itself even in the hour of Armenian 
massacre and Polish famine. And that importance 
could not be disguised by propagandists. When 
[ 344 ] 



conscription took up the people of Britain as a lion 
would lift its whelps by its teeth, not to maul them 
but to make them, it morally could not afford to 
touch the people of Ulster or the people of the south 
of Ireland. Union could not stand that elemental 
test. It is not that Irishmen would not be soldiers. 
Irishmen before had fought for the empire. At the 
very moment when hunger was stalking the poor 
peasantry of Ireland in 1844, the Delanys and the 
Kellys were at Meanee and Dubba with Sir Charles 
Napier, " magnificent Tipperary . . . Irishmen, 
strong in body, high-blooded, fierce, impetuous sol- 
diers who saw nothing but victory before them, and 
counted not their enemies." Reluctance to shoulder 
arms did not hold the Irish people back from the 
world war. Over 90,000 Catholics did enlist in the 
beginning, and the Nationalist party did its best to 
prove that the people were " good Europeans." 
But there was a reason for the weakness of Irish 
response. It was the absence of union, the dearth 
of heart, between the rulers and the ruled. And 
Ireland did not look on the army of the empire as a 
force required for security to itself, thereby accept- 
ing conscription as a necessary evil. On whatever 
occasion the red coat had been seen in Ireland in the 
past, it was to protect a landlord or an employer or 
a clergyman collecting tithes, or else to shoot down 
mobs or destroy rebels. The invasion of Ireland 
was not sufficiently probable to frighten the Irish, and 
Germany was clever enough to understand this. 
The one thing that might have prepared Ireland for 
the war was true membership in an imperial society. 
But until that membership was honorable and volun- 
tary, nationalist Ireland looked on England as Schles- 

[ 345 ] 



wig looks on her empire, or Bohemia on her empire, 
and the talk of empire, (" one throne, one flag, one 
citizenship ") generally made it sick. 

THE NATURE OF FAILURE 

When Lord Milner says " one throne, one flag, 
one citizenship," it represents to him " communis 
patria," " all-round loyalty, the loyalty of each to all, 
of every member to the whole body." When an 
Irish nationalist hears the phrase it still means the 
shooting of stone-throwers, the hauteur of English 
government inspectors, the inequality and privilege 
of Dublin Castle, the ascendancy, the garrison. It 
means Mr. Austen Chamberlain preaching the gos- 
pel of Ireland industrially impotent ("communis 
patria"). It means Mr. Arthur Balfour sneering 
at Gaelic and the " bitter fiction " of Irish national- 
ity ("communis patria"). It means Earl Percy 
and Lord Ellenborough talking foolishly of Ireland 
as Britain's military bondservant. It means giving 
up the group struggle against colonizers and im- 
perialists. That is the native principle at odds with 
the principle of " loyalty." " Ireland has never be- 
come an integral part of the United Kingdom," to 
quote Lord Crewe again, " because the principle of 
Irish nationality has altogether refused to die." 

How to deal with that principle has haunted the 
best British statesmen. From 1885 to 1893 it was 
the preoccupation of England. When the Irish 
people gave up Parnell at Gladstone's behest, the 
English Liberals did not disguise the immediate po- 
litical debt that they had contracted with Ireland, and 
home rule became the formal token of direct moral 
satisfaction. But home rule is a vague phrase. 
[ 346] 



After the land legislation it seemed quite fair to 
many good Liberals to shelve Ireland. They 
thought they could escape the necessity of dealing 
directly with the Irish question. The very fact that 
the demand was largely a moral demand made its 
pressure diffuse and impalpable. To deny it, even, 
was a pleasant temptation. Mr. Asquith and his 
colleagues shambled very reluctantly to fight this af- 
fair of honor. 

What the tepid Liberals hoped for, in the main, 
was a home rule settlement by default. It was all 
very well for the Unionists to contend in 19 12 that 
Ireland had become insolvent " due to Lloyd Geor- 
gian finance," but Lloyd Georgian finance was a 
move in the direction of state socialism, and in that 
direction lay a municipal escape from home rule. 
The final riddance of home rule would be self-gov- 
ernment all-round. If a scheme could be framed to 
give popular councils to Ulster and Scotland and 
Wales and nationalist Ireland, the invidious nation- 
alism of Ireland could be avoided, and separatism de- 
prived of its handle on Irish opinion. British Liber- 
als, in point of fact, always had John Redmond in a 
dilemma as to separatism. If he said he was dis- 
loyal to the empire, he could not have their solemn 
constitutional assistance. If he said he was loyal 
to the empire, his nationalism could be quite fairly 
subordinated. This kind of logomachy kept British 
parliamentarians happy, the horizon always shim- 
mering with the hope that a " moral " question is a 
fanciful question, that Irish prosperity would lap 
away Irish contentiousness, that the coils of discus- 
sion would chill the fervors of particularism. 

[ 347 ] 



UNDYING NATIONALITY 

But it is not politic, even in a question of " more 
and less," to take too many advantages. Like every 
other living political desire, the desire of Irish nation- 
alism is not a fixed quantity or quality. It varies 
from year to year, from group to group, from per- 
sonality to personality. But the fact that it varies, 
that it is compatible with more than one constitution 
or constitutional arrangement, was no guarantee that 
it could be held on the politician's doorstep forever. 
Its very flexibility was an assurance that the longer 
it was edged away and discomfited the more exigent 
it would become. The reality of Ireland to Irish- 
men could not be treated as a theory. It sprang into 
full being with every Irish boy's and Irish girl's un- 
tutored initiation into national history and it renewed 
itself with every dubious phase of government. 
" We are told again and again," said Lord Crewe, 
" that in reality there is no Irish nation. . . . This 
fact of the undying nationality of Ireland is the first 
that emerges from any wide study of history." 
What its terms with the empire would have to be was 
a special question. To evade the question alto- 
gether was to drive Irishmen and Irishwomen to 
intransigence. 

Take, for example, that cheap taunt of Mr. Bal- 
four's, " the bitter fiction that Ireland was once a 
4 nation ' whose national life has been destroyed by 
its more powerful neighbor." Against it the Irish 
youth sets everything he knows of England's attempt 
to sponsor this deft politician's " vital lie." Under 
the system of education bestowed on Ireland in this 
spirit the child's " history book mentioned Ireland 
[ 348 ] 



twice only — a place conquered by Henry II; and 
made into an English province by the union. The 
quotation ' This is my own, my native land,' was 
struck out of the reading-book as pernicious, and the 
Irish boy was taught to thank God for being ' a 
happy English child.' " Mrs. John R. Green, from 
whom I quote, recalls for young Ireland what " un- 
dying nationality " really consists of, despite the sup- 
pressions of school books, j" Amid contempt, perse- 
cution, proscription, death, the outcast Irish cherished 
their language and poetry, their history and lav/, 
with the old pride and devotion. In that supreme 
and unselfish loyalty to their race they found dignity 
in humiliation and patience in disaster, and have left, 
out of the depths of their poverty and sorrow, one 
of the noblest examples of history." So much for 
the tradition. The destruction sneered at by Mr. 
Balfour is not unchronicled. " We may ask 
whether in the history of the world there was cast 
out of any country such genius, learning, and indus- 
try, as the English flung, as it were, into the sea. . . . 
Every vestige of their tradition was doomed — their 
religion was forbidden, and the staff of Patrick and 
Cross of Columcille destroyed, with every other na- 
tional relic; their schools were scattered, their 
learned men hunted down, their books burned; na- 
tive industries were abolished; the inauguration 
chairs of their chiefs were broken in pieces, and the 
law of the race torn up, codes of inheritance, of land 
tenure, of contract between neighbors or between 
lord and man. The very image of Justice which the 
race had fashioned for itself was shattered. Love 
of country and every attachment of race and history 
became a crime, and even Irish language and dress 

[ 349 ] 



were forbidden under penalty of outlawry or excom- 
munication. ' No more shall any laugh there,' 
wrote the poet, ' or children gambol; music is choked, 
the Irish language chained.' " It is dangerous, in 
the hour of Belgium, to deny that such things can 
happen or have happened. What is the anthology 
of native Irish poetry? Long before the historians 
discovered " nationality " for political purposes the 
heart of Irish poetry flamed and smouldered with 
one consuming love, the love of Ireland. That love 
enwrapped and consoled the people of Ireland and 
today it is merely necessary for England to smite the 
love of Ireland to flash loyalty to the powder-mine 
of an oppressed race's memory. If this be " bitter 
fiction " to Mr. Balfour, it is the kind of bitter fiction 
for which men have come to die in France. 

Nationality is not of itself incompatible with em- 
pire. A nation no more sympathetic than Bavaria 
is to Prussia could become a strong component of the 
German empire. It is possible for the sharpest par- 
ticularism to defer so long as public safety quite 
clearly demands it, and economic welfare is not for- 
feit, and religious and national character are not de- 
nied. But the great principle of organizing peoples 
into commonwealths is never to be advanced as long 
as union is promoted by persons with a relentless 
vested interest. The principle of imperial or federal 
sentiment may be irrefutable but it is mere perfume 
on a cancer if the synonym of the imperialists is 
privilege. 

This is the root of raw Irish discontent with the 
empire and it is the root of the failure of good ad- 
ministration. In dealing with Jamaican Negroes it 
is perfectly feasible to let the children gamble with 
[ 35o ] 



paper money and dress the part of citizenship. 
Jamaica is one of the triumphs of English administra- 
tion, including a fully equipped toy legislature. But 
when men have an oppressive national responsibility 
like the Irish, and suffer with the neglect of the re- 
sponsibility, the point comes where they must demand 
and insist upon the power which that responsibility 
implies. It is not in the nature of any European 
race (or any human race, I dare say) to do other- 
wise. And to take that power on sufferance, to take 
it while guaranteeing that it shall be used in some par- 
ticular fashion, is not conceivable. It is not conceiv- 
able to say in advance, for example, what Ireland 
shall or shall not do in the future. As Parnell sensi- 
bly said, " We have never attempted to fix the ne 
plus ultra of Ireland's nationhood and we never 
shall "; and as he said again, " no man shall set a 
boundary on the onward march of a nation." 

ABSOLUTE INDEPENDENCE 

Those who understand nationality are not like to 
combat such assertions. The cry of " separatism," 
for example, has never dismayed the stronger intelli- 
gences in England. Opponents of home rule like 
Professor A. V. Dicey have taken honorable pains to 
do justice to the separatists' case for absolute inde- 
pendence. " The position they occupy," he once 
said, " is one of which no man has any cause to feel 
ashamed. The opinion that, considering the misery 
which has marked the connection between England 
and Ireland, the happiest thing for the weaker coun- 
try would be complete separation from the United 
Kingdom, is one which in common with most Eng- 
lishmen, and, it may be added, in common with the 

[ 35i ] 



wisest foreign observers, I do not share; but fairness 
requires the admission that it is an opinion which a 
man may hold and may act upon, without incurring 
the charge either of folly or of wickedness." Mark 
the words, " act upon." If he is caught, as Roger 
Casement was caught, he may be put in the tower 
instead of the cabinet, and he may be executed, but 
it will not be fair to charge him with folly or wicked- 
ness, or to demean the British empire, as official 
propagandists like Mr. Alfred Noyes and Captain 
Ian Hay Beith demeaned it in their partisanship, by 
circulating irrelevant sexual rumors after the man 
was dead — continuing the loathsome work that be- 
gan while he was still on trial. Many nations have 
separated without unwholesome perpetuation of ran- 
cor, as for instance Norway and Sweden, Belgium 
and Holland, England and the United States. Sep- 
aratism may lead to disintegration or it may lead to 
growth. There is no principle of union to cover 
every case. 

The absolute independence of Ireland is undoubt- 
edly open to several objections. Mr. Dicey has ad- 
mirably summarized the English objections. " The 
national independence of Ireland entails three great 
evils — the deliberate surrender of the main object 
at which English statesmanship has aimed for cen- 
turies, together with all the moral loss and disgrace 
which such surrender entails; the loss of considerable 
material resources in money, and still more in men; 
the incalculable evil of the existence in the neighbour- 
hood of Great Britain of a new, a foreign, and, pos- 
sibly, a hostile state. For these evils there are, in- 
deed, to be found two real though inadequate com- 
pensations — namely, the probability that loss of 
[ 352 ] 



territory might restore to England a unity and con- 
sistency of action equivalent to an increase in 
strength, and the possibility that separation might be 
the first step towards gaining the good will, and ulti- 
mately the alliance of Ireland. It is, however, 
hardly worth while to calculate what might be the 
extent of the possible deductions from evils which 
no English statesmen would knowingly bring on 
Great Britain. By men of all parties and of all 
views it is practically conceded that England neither 
will nor can, except under compulsion, assent to Irish 
independence." 

It has been a signal defect in English policy, I 
think, not to envisage Irish independence and to ob- 
serve its advantages. England has needed a states- 
man who could so conceive Irishmen as to respect 
their wishes and enter into a broad and sincere discus- 
sion of their extremest expression. It has needed a 
statesman who could think of Irishmen as the United 
States has thought of Filipinos. But before an 
English statesman could do this he had first to settle 
his scores with Anglo-Ireland, and that no English 
statesman has been quite able to do. The garrison 
has a claim on Ireland which it has declined to remit. 
It has a vested interest in the union, selfishly and nar- 
rowly insisted upon, and the highest flight of its 
patriotism to England or Ireland has never, since 
the infamy of the union, risen above timorous devolu- 
tion or weak federalism. The " desertion " of the 
garrison is, beyond doubt, the clue to England's 
undertaking an alliance with Ireland. And so long 
as England sets the garrison above Ireland, the rela- 
tion with Ireland is seriously perverted. 

This, as I see it, is at the core of England's ad- 
[ 353 ] 



minlstrative difficulty in Ireland. If England had 
been able to administer Ireland for Ireland's good, 
the Irish might now be coordinated; or if England 
had been able to show Ireland its better self, as it 
has shown Scotland its better self, the acquiescence in 
union might be cordial. But the toll demanded by 
Anglo-Ireland has always been so heavy, in patron- 
age if not always in profit, that the native Irish could 
see little that is admirable or desirable in the empire. 
The " moral loss and disgrace " of which Mr. Dicey 
speaks has been entailed much more by holding Ire- 
land for the parasites than it could have been by any 
deliberate surrender. It has been entailed by losing 
4,000,000 discontented citizens through emigration 
in sixty years. This is the fact that men who are 
inured to an established church and landlordism and 
an aristocratic diplomacy and a wigged judiciary do 
not easily see. The " dunghill civilization " of Ire- 
land seldom appears to them to have real possibili- 
ties outside its colonial possibilities. Their imagina- 
tions cannot seize on these Britannic incongruities in 
Ireland which are apparent to an Irishman. What 
is a benign excrescence in England, after all, may be 
an intolerable disorder to Ireland. This is where 
high conservatives like Mr. Dicey lack that intimate 
knowledge of " dunghill civilization " which would 
so improve a human judgment. 

THE ULSTER DIFFICULTY 

Absolute independence is open to several serious 
objections from Irishmen themselves. The princi- 
pal of these objections arises from the unionist inter- 
est in Ireland. 

A very strong force binds Ulster to Great Britain. 
[ 354 I 



It is, as has been amplified, Belfast's industrialism. 
Seen from Belfast the union has been a reasonably 
successful union, in spite of educational and cultural 
deficiencies in Ulster. The homogeneity of the two 
Protestant nations, Britain and Ulster, has been ac- 
centuated by the sameness of industrial and commer- 
cial interests. Belfast has adopted machine technol- 
ogy and understood Britain's adoption of machine 
technology, and the success of Belfast has created a 
special mental and emotional norm in the north. 
That norm is felt by some Ulstermen to be identical 
with England's. Ulster, said Mr. Thomas Sinclair 
in 19 1 2, " wishes to continue as an Irish Lancashire* 
or an Irish Lanarkshire." But identical or not, the 
separation from England is not desired. Not only 
does Mr. Sinclair feel certain that separation would 
" degrade the status of Ulster citizenship by impair- 
ing its relationship to imperial parliament " and 
would " seriously injure Ulster's material prosperity 
— industrial, commercial, agricultural," but he is 
equally convinced that an all-Ireland parliament 
would " gravely imperil Ulster's civil and religious 
liberties " and would " involve the entire denomina- 
tionalizing, in the interests of the Roman Catholic 
church, of Irish education in all its branches." The 
Ulster opposition to home rule is therefore more 
than economic. " It is," as Lord Londonderry put 
it, " an uprising of a people against tyranny and co- 
ercion; against condemnation to servitude; against 
deprivation of the right of citizens to an effective 
voice in the government of the country." 

And a positive Ulster sentiment in favor of the 
union must be included in this testimonial of opposi- 
tion. " The union," says Lord Londonderry, " has 

[ 355 ] 



been no obstacle to their [Ulstermen's] develop- 
ment: Why should it have been the barrier to the 
rest of Ireland? Ulstermen believe that the union 
with Great Britain has assisted the development of 
their commerce and industry. They are proud of 
the progress of Belfast and of her position in the 
industrial and shipping world. Without great natu- 
ral advantages it has been built up by energy, appli- 
cation, clearheadedness and hard work. The oppo- 
sition to home rule is the revolt of a business and 
industrial community against the domination of men 
who have shown no aptitude for either. The United 
Irish League, the official organization of the home 
rule party, is, as a treasurer once confessed, remark- 
ably lacking in the support of business men, mer- 
chants, manufacturers, leaders of industry, bankers, 
and men who compose a successful and progressive 
community. In the management of their party 
funds, their impending bankruptcy but a few years 
ago, the mad scheme of New Tipperary, and the 
fiasco of the Parnell Migration Company there is the 
same monotonous story of failure. Can surprise be 
felt that Ulstermen refuse to place the control of 
national affairs in the hands of those who have shown 
little capacity in the direction of their own personal 
concerns? What responsible statesman would sug- 
gest that the City of London, Liverpool, Manchester, 
Sheffield, Newcastle, or any advancing industrial and 
commercial centre in Great Britain should be ruled 
and governed and taxed, without the hope of effective 
intervention, by a party led by Mr. Keir Hardie and 
Mr. Lansbury? Yet home rule means much like 
that for Ulstermen, and the impossibility of the 
scheme is emphasized in the example of Ireland by 
[ 356 ] 



religious differences which have their roots in Irish 
history." 

I have quoted this long passage to illustrate the 
exact idiom of the impasse between Ulster and the 
south. On one side success, progress, energy, clear 
heads, hard work; on the other side failure, impend- 
ing bankruptcy, mad schemes, the British Labor 
Party, small capacity. Lord Londonderry pro- 
claims it from the housetops. He leaves no doubt 
that he means what he says. 

The impasse here is largely psychological, and 
Ulster's psychological state is not unlike the Prussian 
psychological state. There is the arrogance of Prus- 
sia, " refusing " to place the control of government 
when the placing of control was obviously not in its 
province. There is the self-conceit of Prussia, " I 
alone possess energy, application, clearheadedness 
and hard work." There is Prussia's cry of tyranny 
and coercion, when the record of Ulster is by no 
means free from these amiabilities, coming from the 
plantation down to the necessity for governmental 
suppression of Orange lodges in 1836, with little 
touches of vaudeville before and after. (" In 
1869," Canon Courtenay Moore recalls, "Queen 
Victoria's Crown was to be kicked into the Boyne 
if she gave her Royal assent to Mr. Gladstone's 
church act. Well, she gave it, and the Crown re- 
mained on her head.") The truculence of Ulster 
has its admirable side, as the truculence of Prussia 
has its admirable side, but Ulster has taken a posi- 
tion in the national sphere psychologically corre- 
sponding to Prussia's in the international. 

A " quiet bystander " must be invoked to describe 
the background of this Ulster soul. Unless it is 

[ 357 ] 



taken in terms of soul as well as politics, the dead- 
lock becomes mercilessly fast. 

"Business is civilization, think many of us; it 
creates and implies it. The general diffusion of ma- 
terial well-being is civilization, thought Mr. Cobden, 
as that eminent man's biographer has just informed 
us; it creates and implies it. Not always. And for 
fear we should forget what business and what ma- 
terial well-being have to create, before they do really 
imply civilization, let us, at the risk of being thought 
tiresome, repeat here what we have said often of 
old. Business and material well-being are signs of 
expansion and parts of it; but civilization, that great 
and complex force, includes much more than ever that 
power of expansion of which they are parts. It in- 
cludes also the power of conduct, the power of intel- 
lect and knowledge, the power of beauty, the power 
of social life and manners. To the building up of 
human life all these powers belong. If business is 
civilization, then business must manage to evolve all 
these powers; if a widely spread material well-being 
is civilization, then that well-being must manage to 
evolve all of them. It is written: Man doth not 
live by bread alone." 

It may be said that Matthew Arnold was writing 
of Puritan England. Yes. " But the genuine, un- 
mitigated Murdstone is the common middle-class 
Englishman, who has come forth from Salem House 
and Mr. Creakle. He is seen in full force, of course, 
in the Protestant north; but throughout Ireland he is 
a prominent figure of the English garrison. Him 
the Irish see, see him only too much and too often. 
. . . The thing has no power of attraction. The 
Irish quick-wittedness, sentiment, keen feeling for 
[ 358] 



social life and manners, demand something which this 
hard and imperfect civilization cannot give them. 
Its social form seems to them unpleasant, its energy 
and industry lead to no happiness, its religion to be 
false and repulsive." 

Matthew Arnold did not include in these strictures 
his sense of Ireland's " wrong-headed distrust of 
England." He stated that elsewhere. But much 
more clearly and more sweetly and more sensitively 
than most of us could express it, he has framed the 
notion of those ideals by which Lord Londonderry 
seeks to guide the destinies of Ireland. 

What has Belfast instead of culture, to fill its soul ? 
So fair an observer as Mr. Norman Hapgood, visit- 
ing Belfast in May, 19 17, may be quoted to exhibit 
the place that denominationalism has in the cultural 
realm of Belfast. 

" Actually I felt as if I were living in the time of 
Cromwell. Every Sunday there are in the Protest- 
ant churches sermons urging the faithful to hold out 
against the menace of home rule. I took a large 
part of my meals in private houses, and not once was 
there a meal which was not preceded by grace. I 
went to a lunch in a private room in a restaurant, at 
which the other guests were some of the most active 
business men in the town, and there likewise grace 
was said. Everywhere one heard the word Popery. 

" There was the energy also of the Roundhead, as 
well as his earnest affiliation with his own Church and 
his unconquerable fear of the Pope. I have been in 
many parts of the world which had a mediaeval at- 
mosphere about them, but not in the most picturesque 
hamlet, apart from all modern influences, have I ever 
felt the hand of the past more powerfully than in 

[ 359 ] 



the rushing industrial centre called Belfast. When 
one considers the wonderful record of this city, build- 
ing up great industries and great prosperity without 
coal, iron, or other natural resources, it becomes still 
more startling to find one's self at every turn carried 
back to the almost forgotten fears and suspicions of 
the past." 

This seems to me to corroborate Matthew Arnold 
pretty completely. And it has the fibre of Prussia 
in it. 

THE DOG IN THE MANGER 

Conscientious outsiders may agree that Arnold's 
is a most telling analysis of elderly Ulster's opaque- 
ness and hardness, but they can rightly assert that 
such hardness remains inherent and formidable. It 
creates an iron obstacle to absolute independence. 
Even if Britain disregarded the warning of Admiral 
Mahan, even if it gave Ireland full sovereignty with 
its eyes opened to the military danger of full sover- 
eignty, the great obduracy of Ulster would stand in 
the way of reasonable success. It is silly to be cate- 
gorical in these matters or to argue docility, but I 
cannot believe that full Irish sovereignty would be 
made stable short of English complaisance and the 
nationalists winning a fierce civil war. Right or not, 
the Ulsterman would resist the experiment and do his 
best to cripple it. 

But home rule, backed by the English people, is a 
very different matter. Where absolute independence 
would have immense obstacles to conquer, seeing the 
forces behind the Ulsterman in England, there is 
every reason for deeming semi-independence practica- 
ble and supposing that the English people will sup- 

C 360] 



port it. Not, however, until the case of Ulster has 
been definitely understood and disposed of, as it 
never has been understood and disposed of since the 
first debates of home rule. 

The outsider is entitled to concentrate his atten- 
tion on Ulster. He has heard a great deal about 
Ireland's baulked disposition, Ireland's nationalism, 
Ireland's self-determination. If such arguments for 
liberty have a virtue in them, how can they be ignored 
when offered by the protesting minority of Ulster? 
Can that minority be justly overborne? The very 
essence of Ulster opposition to home rule is particu- 
larism. If it is wrong for agricultural Ireland to be 
placed under the heel of a British parliament, is it 
not equally wrong for industrial North-East Ulster 
to be placed under the heel of a Dublin parliament? 
Is a bill of Ulster rights any security? A written 
guarantee in the act of union did not save the estab- 
lished church. Are not the Ulster leaders right to 
scorn " paper safeguards," " artificial guarantees "? 
They absolutely refuse to reason about the union. 
Is not this refusal warranted? 

I do not think it is. Granting the particularity of 
North-East Ulster, it has no conceivable right to in- 
terdict home rule for the rest of Ireland. Yet home 
rule for any part of Ireland remains seriously handi- 
capped until Ulster consents to do its share. It is 
this that makes it imperative for Ulster's pride and 
recalcitrance to be judged in relation to consequences. 
Ulster is not merely standing out for its own prefer- 
ences. It is standing squarely in the path of Ireland's 
necessities, necessities that are clearly reconcilable 
with Ulster's own. If Ulster could be " left alone," 
as it has repeatedly asked to be left alone, the intru- 

[ 36i ] 



sion of home rule would be an impertinence. But 
Ulster is not Lanarkshire or Lancashire. " This 
conception of the Protestants in Ulster being a sort 
of projection of England, or of Scotland," as Lord 
Dunraven phrased it, " is not an Irish idea. It is a 
purely British invention. It is a sort of British 
patent that is brought out every now and then for 
political purposes." Ulster is part of Ireland, with 
half its population Catholic nationalists, and Catholic 
nationalists interlarded all through. This striature 
of Catholics and Protestants, nationalists and anti- 
nationalists, Irish and Scotch-Ulstermen, is by no 
means so insufferable as the tenor of argument may 
indicate. " We gladly acknowledge," declares Mr. 
Thomas Sinclair, " that in most parts of Ireland 
Protestants and Roman Catholics, as regards the 
ordinary affairs of life, live side by side on friendly 
neighborly terms." But serious as it would be to 
strangulate nationalist Ulster, in an avowedly Union- 
ist department, that is not the final objection to sec- 
tionalism. The final objection is the ruthless de- 
rangement of home rule. 

By this I do not mean that Ulster must be " bul- 
lied." I only mean that the minority in Ireland 
must do better than act the dog in the manger. For 
a great many years the fiercest opposition to Irish 
liberty cime from the landed interest. When the 
land laws went into effect the landed interest retained 
a sentimental objection to Irish liberty, but now 
everyone observes that, owing largely to Sir Horace 
Plunkett, the southern Unionists are practically pre- 
pared to favor home rule. The Ulster opposition 
has a different cultural aspect and a different 
economic bias. If the economic and cultural bias 
[ 362 ] 



is comprehended and an adjustment made obvi- 
ous, Ulster may be counted on to yield. To every 
revolution, of course, there is a counter-revolution, 
and there will always be men in Ulster who would 
rather die than consent to home rule. It is the 
business of statesmanship to subtract as much 
support as possible from these victims of prejudice. 
No gain can be made in this direction, however, by 
proposing, as the Irish convention proposed, to sanc- 
tion undemocratic prejudice on the part of Ulster in 
the actual terms of agreement. The guarantees to 
Ulster property and propriety cannot take the form 
of loading the electoral dice. If Ulster's position is 
invidious in any respect, it must be arranged that 
everything which affects that position should be con- 
ditioned on Ulster's consent. But checks and bal- 
ances cannot be applied to the actual parliamentary 
balloting. The idea of conceding Ulster twenty 
yards on every electoral hundred yards, for example, 
is compromise gone mad. The essence of Ulster's 
self-determination is consent, but there is an ascer- 
tainable difference between consent, a reasonable 
function of the mind, and self-will, an inordinate 
function. Ulster's self-will cannot be permitted to 
dictate the fate of Ireland, any more than Prussia's 
self-will can be permitted to dictate the fate of Eu- 
rope. If Ulster refuses " consent " to a new Irish 
constitution, on the grounds of Popery or southern 
ignorance or what-not, then the statesman must pre- 
pare to deal with the reasonable elements and isolate 
the unreasonable. The presence of a violently un- 
reasonable element, whether Orange or Sinn Fein, 
cannot be allowed to destroy Ireland. 

In fighting for the union, I have no doubt that the 
[ 363 ] 



conservatives in Ireland are making a good " prac- 
tical " decision. Under the union a great deal of the 
power that is distributed by government is secure in 
conservative hands. But the creative forces of Ire- 
land are disregarded by such a decision. Power is 
left with those who have never won the confidence 
of the people, who cannot work for the welfare of 
the people, who are partitioned off from the people 
by their very preference for the union. This is the 
crux of Ulster vs. Ireland. What home rule means 
is the removal of high undemocratic barriers in every 
department of Irish government. It means the in- 
flux of many more Catholics and nationalists into 
public offices that have been withheld from the peo- 
ple, and it means a new tone, probably a crude tone, 
in Irish life. But the flood of vitality cannot prove 
so pernicious as the Ulstermen forecast. All the 
horrors that were anticipated on the introduction of 
local government are now completely forgotten. 
They were empty dreams. The Ulstermen are not 
ogres, the Catholics are not malignant. Where they 
have worked together, in the Gaelic League and the 
department of agriculture and the cooperative move- 
ment and even the national schools, the outcome has 
been something vastly better than the Ulstermen ex- 
pected. Bigotry still exists and must be recognized. 
" A few years ago," the ominous Mr. Sinclair nar- 
rates, " a Protestant member of a public service was 
transferred upon promotion from Belfast to a 
Roman Catholic district, in which his boys had no 
available school but that of the Christian Brothers, 
and his girls none but that of the local convent. I 
shall never forget the expression of that man's face 
or the pathos in his voice while he pressed me to help 
[ 364] 



him to obtain a transfer to a Protestant district, as 
otherwise he feared his children would be lost to the 
faith of their fathers. Given a parliament in Dub- 
lin, the management of education would be so con- 
ducted as gradually to extinguish Protestant minori- 
ties in the border counties of Ulster and in other 
provinces of Ireland. It is here that a chief danger 
to Protestantism lies." This is the kind of panic and 
hypothesis that alarms one for human nature itself. 
Mr. Sinclair is a sensible man but he gives not one 
atom of evidence that the Christian Brothers would 
take so mean an advantage. There is a great deal 
of evidence in favor of the Christian Brothers on this 
very point of proselytism. Yet Catholics will be 
found with that same unforgettable expression and 
that same vocal pathos until both frightened sects are 
flung into the bath of community. 

If home rule were to handicap Ulstermen in their 
economic or religious freedom, home rule would be 
doomed. But Lord Morley spoke soundly when he 
said that the whole weight and force of American 
influence, for one thing, would be " inevitably adverse 
to anything like sectarianism, oppression, or unfair 
play." The Irish nationalists would be fools and 
the Catholic hierarchy would be fools to embark on 
anything that faintly resembled intolerance. But the 
genuine hope in the situation, the one aerial element 
above all these squirming doubts and fears, is not to 
be found in the bill itself. " So far as an act of 
parliament can either guide or enforce a principle so 
subtle and delicate as the principle of toleration and 
religious equality, Clauses 3 and 4 of this bill have 
clinched and clamped that principle beyond the power 
of evasion," testified Lord Morley. " For my own 

[ 365 ] 



part, however, I have faith in something surer than 
any clauses in a bill. It is my conviction that faith 
in religious tolerance and religious freedom — not 
indifference, not scepticism, not disbelief — by one of 
those deep, silent transformations which do some- 
thing to make history endurable, has worked itself 
not only into surface professions of men and women 
today, but into the manners, usages, and the whole 
habits of men's minds, and nothing will persuade me 
that this benignant atmosphere is not going to diffuse 
itself even in Ireland." 

THE BONE OF CONTENTION 

So far I have only spoken of Ulster's determina- 
tion not to have home rule. What is the home rule 
that England was afraid to give to Ireland? I hesi- 
tate to quote the bill that went into law in 19 14. 
After Mr. Thomas Sinclair, Lord Londonderry, Sir 
Edward Carson, one might expect in this bill a dan- 
gerous extension of power, a measure of trust and 
understanding, a genuine magna charta. The Irish 
are still being accused of not appreciating England. 
" They distrust and misunderstand England," la- 
mented Professor H. S. Canby of Yale in May, 1 9 1 8. 
Perhaps the American who has read so far, who has 
attended to the Ulster protest and the Unionist 
exacerbation, may judge the sense of justice displayed 
by the garrison when he takes the actual terms of 
the home rule bill into account. 

I record, first of all, the limits set to the authority 
of the Irish parliament. They spell out subordina- 
tion: 

" Notwithstanding the establishment of the Irish 
parliament or anything contained in this act, the su- 
[ 366 ] 



preme power and authority of the parliament of the 
United Kingdom shall remain unaffected and un- 
diminished over all persons, matters, and things in 
Ireland and every part thereof." 

This is Lord Londonderry's idea of a conspiracy 
against the constitution. It is the kind of conspiracy 
that Canada, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand 
have darkly entered upon. 

I next transcribe the guarantees that are given to 
Ulster, apart altogether from the fact that the initial 
senate is nominated by the crown, that Ireland has 
nothing whatever to say to war and peace, army or 
navy, and various other minor functions of govern- 
ment. Here are the guarantees : " In the exercise 
of their power to make laws under this act the Irish 
parliament shall not make a law so as directly or in- 
directly to establish or endow any religion, or pro- 
hibit or restrict the free exercise thereof, or give a 
preference, privilege, or advantage, or impose any 
disability or disadvantage, on account of religious 
belief or religious or ecclesiastical status, or make any 
religious belief or religious ceremony a condition of 
the validity of any marriage, or affect prejudicially 
the right of any child to attend a school receiving 
public money without attending the religious instruc- 
tion at that school, or alter the constitution of any re- 
ligious body except where the alteration is approved 
on behalf of the religious body by the governing body 
thereof, or divert from any religious denomination 
the fabric of cathedrals, churches," and so on. 

This is the bill that the nationalists of Ireland pro- 
cured after thirty years of agitation. There was no 
joint or loophole left in it for one whiff of effective 
religious prejudice. There was no sovereignty or 

[367 ] 



pretence or shadow of sovereignty in it. There was 
no power in it that Westminster could not nullify, 
amend, alter, or grind to dust. In the new Irish House 
of Commons Ulster was to have 59 members out of 
164, giving the Unionists a solid third. In the initial 
Senate Ulster was to have all the guarantee that 
could be conferred by the King's nominating it. The 
control of the police was to remain with England for 
a term of years. The appointment of judges was to 
go to the lord lieutenant. All the civil servants 
under the old establishment were firmly protected in 
their rights. The main power was a parliamentary 
control of the functions now arbitrarily exercised by 
Dublin Castle, and the right to vary taxation within 
a certain tightly tethered range. This is the measure 
which Lord Londonderry called " tyranny and co- 
ercion," which 470,000 people signed a petition 
against, which led Sir Edward Carson into treason- 
able conspiracy and compelled Lord French to give 
up his empire's sword. It is only when the genuine 
issue, absolute independence, is brought into contrast 
with this handcuffed parliament of Mr. Asquith that 
the falsification of Ulsterism is exposed. Men say 
that Ulster is " sincere," that the signers of the 
Covenant are grim and resolute and determined. So 
are the Prussians " sincere " and grim and resolute 
and determined. But what has this to do with the 
claim that Ulster is fighting for its liberty? The 
claim has no basis in fact. Behind the protest of 
Ulster hang the miserable self-interest and imperial- 
ism which intruded on Ireland at the first coloniza- 
tions of Ulster, which have kept watchman's step 
with the native Irish since the primary injustice to 
them and which have written themselves not merely 

[ 368 ] 



into the opposition to home rule but into every grudg- 
ing syllable of the bill itself. If the British empire 
were a mean and crafty bargainer, warped with tak- 
ing advantage of the weak, crabbed with skimming 
profit from hardship, I do not think it could have 
devised a more small-spirited or contemptible mea- 
sure than this home rule which it first conceded and 
then so warily and anxiously drew back. If Ireland 
takes such a bill, it will only be because it has de- 
scended to the level of the huckster and the cheese- 
parer. Home rule on the terms of this Asquith and 
Lloyd George liberalism is home rule for a penal 
colony. It is a mystery to nationalism how John 
Redmond could have accepted such worthless politi- 
cal odds and ends. 

And yet, with all the precautions of Westminster, 
Sir Edward Carson and Lord Londonderry did not 
propose to relinquish this remnant to the Irish. Dub- 
lin Castle was their high concern. The bill proposed 
the disinfection and popularization of Dublin Castle. 
This they refused. Unionists " refuse to place the 
control " of their Dublin Castle in the hands of the 
people of Ireland. It was the fear that this single 
function of the home rule bill would become operative 
that startled the apprehensions of Ulster's leaders. 
The ark of which Ulster signed the covenant was not 
the sacred ark of the old testament but the scabrous 
ark of the Old Guard. The insolence of Sir Edward 
Carson and Lord Londonderry and the rest had 
nothing better than Dublin Castle to justify it — 
the home of bureaucracy, the labyrinth of prejudice. 
The oppressed minority of Ulster does not remain 
deeply tragic in the light of Sir Edward Carson's 
anxieties for Dublin Castle. So long as Ulster 

[ 369 ] 



workmen and Ulster farmers believe in the devilry 
of Rome, " the horrible harlot, the kirk malignant," 
they can be made available for such purposes as Car- 
son's. But does he believe in the devilry of Rome? 
Does he believe in the " to hell with the pope " non- 
sense? An experienced London barrister, trained in 
the slippery ingenuities and sophistications of the 
London bar, Sir Edward Carson knows just exactly 
how much and how little the Pope has to do with 
Irish politics. But know-nothingism, Rum-Roman- 
ism-and-Rebellion, remain convenient war-cries so 
long as Ulster workmen look askance at low-priced 
Catholic competition, so long as Ulster farmers read 
sectarian newspapers in the loneliness of their Ulster 
farms. This is the background of Ulster " oppres- 
sion." In all the hideous prejudice that Lord Lon- 
donderry and Sir Edward Carson stirred up during 
the home rule campaign (perhaps to their own be- 
wilderment, after all their bloodhound baying) there 
was nothing recent or ponderable to justify religious 
apprehension. " I know Ireland well," said the anti- 
nationalist Walter Long, " I have many relations and 
friends there, both Protestant and Roman Catholic; 
and I believe that religious difficulties will be settled 
by the common-sense of the people." This is the 
doctrine to which fair observation admits practically 
every Irishman. Yet Sir Edward Carson imported 
arms from Germany making a cry of tyranny and co- 
ercion. He set Ulster to invoking God, " humbly 
relying on the God whom our fathers in days of stress 
and trial confidently trusted," and aroused the anti- 
social sentiment that usually goes with such Prussian 
invocation, to range it against the " conspiracy " of 
home rule. 

[ 37o ] 



The deference which Mr. Asquith and Mr. Lloyd 
George paid to the supposed oppression of Ulster 
came less from principle than from policy. There 
was no principle by which Ulster could reveal itself 
compromised or baulked or injured. In setting itself 
up to veto home rule, it took the position not of an 
offended and outraged minority but of a resolute 
dictator. The proposal of Ulster seclusion was re- 
jected by John Redmond at first, at last submitted to 
the vote of Nationalist party delegates in Ulster, and 
finally assented to, only to be thrown aside by the 
Unionists. The difficulties and disadvantages of se- 
clusion are certainly enormous, and Ulster was really 
wise to reject it, but its rejection can only mean that 
a genuine measure of home rule, equivalent to the 
measure conferred on the Dominion of Canada, is 
to become the demand of Ireland. 

The enactment of full dominion government would 
prevent the injury to Ulster that might occur from a 
supine measure like the Asquith measure. It would 
hearten Irishmen everywhere to a large and creative 
experiment. It would afford Ireland that " moral 
satisfaction " without which it has been handicapped 
and depressed in all its relations to the empire. It 
would make it a full and a glad member in the com- 
radeship of the dominions. Anything less is morally 
and materially dangerous. 

Until England takes its lesson from Campbell- 
Bannerman's treatment of the Boers there is no 
hope in the Irish situation, and no travesty of the 
South African convention like Lloyd George's Irish 
convention — appointed with too obvious intention 
from groups too brazenly manoeuvred — can bring 
about that glorious adjustment. Mr. S. K. Ratcliffe 

[ 37i ] 



has narrated a story, possibly a parable, of that 
Liberal act. " When the future of the Boer repub- 
lics was being considered, Campbell-Bannerman was 
talking with a distinguished Canadian statesman. 
He spoke about the great pressure that was being 
brought to bear upon him in reference to delay in 
the granting of self-government to the Boers, and 
asked, 'What is your advice?' The Canadian 
statesman said: 'In 1837 Canada was in revolu- 
tion. You trusted us. Have you ever had any rea- 
son to regret that action? Do the same for South 
Africa, and you will have the same result and the 
same response.' Campbell-Bannerman said, ' By 
God, I will ' — and he did it. As a result, we have 
had South Africa in this war lined up with the older 
self-governing colonies of Great Britain, and the 
disruption of the British Empire has been averted." 
The destiny of Ireland has slipped from the hands 
of the old order in England. A new order is arising 
within the British commonwealth, and it is by the 
statesmen of this new order that the problem of 
Ireland must be solved. An imperial history has 
preceded the accession of British labor to British 
government. Ireland's memory of this history will 
disappear like last year's leaves if the believers in 
British democracy apply their first principles to the 
settlement of Ireland. The task is a creative one. 
It is not simply a task of assisting stubborn Ulster 
to abide with the nationalist, nor is it simply a task 
of seeing religious institutions as human institutions, 
to be respected as well as restrained. It is a more 
formidable task. The new England has to trust its 
own belief in liberty to the extent of trusting in Irish- 
men's liberty. It has to admit Ireland to full and 
[ 372 ] 



free membership in the commonwealth for which so 
many Britons have died. It was the England of 
privilege that sought in a blind moment to enforce 
conscription on Ireland. The bankruptcy of grudg- 
ing and self-seeking England was never more com- 
pletely revealed. It was these very qualities in the 
England of privilege that gave democratic England 
its right to insist upon the revision of existing insti- 
tutions and existing concepts of government. The 
new order is on the verge of realization. The de- 
gree in which it becomes realized is the degree in 
which Ulster and nationalist Ireland can clear their 
past and enter into their common destiny. 



[ 373 1 



XIV 
THE WAY TO FREEDOM 

THE END OF DOCILITY 

WHEN Daniel O'Connell died at Genoa he 
ordered that his body should be sent to Ireland, but 
his heart to Rome. " A disposition," said John 
Mitchel, " which proves how miserably broken and 
debilitated was that once potent nature." A dispo- 
sition, on the contrary, which proved the essential 
division and debility of Daniel O'Connell's entire 
career. " He was a Catholic, sincere and devout," 
said Mitchel, " and would not see that the church had 
ever been the enemy of Irish Freedom." That is the 
truth. He was a Catholic who feared and dreaded 
Revolution. His first allegiance was to his religion, 
his second to his country. Reared in abhorrence of 
Napoleon, he believed and declared that no revolu- 
tion was worth the spilling of a single drop of blood. 
" He was an aristocrat by position and by taste; and 
the name of a Republic was odious to him." He 
was the child of authority. He strove to win his 
way by feigning violence, by " eternally half-un- 
sheathing a visionary sword." But he was one of 
those men whose scales are always turned by a power 
outside. The centre of his being was not within 
himself. He was the child of authority. For that 
reason, possessing no effective will of his own, he 
[374] 



indoctrinated cowardice, and his doctrine of cow- 
ardice, as M. Paul-Dubois rightly calls it, " is proved 
untrue by the whole history of modern liberty." 

The doctrine of cowardice has always had its ad- 
vocates in Ireland. It has long fed the policy of non- 
resistance. It pretends that life is an idyl in which 
effective will is " materialism " and the struggle for 
survival a debasement of the soul. A great deal is 
heard of Irish conservatism : this is its fountain-head. 
In the name of spirituality Ireland is asked to accept 
a doctrine of laissez faire, to glide on the current of 
authority. 

But this docile programme was shattered in 
Easter, 191 6. The earnestness of Padraic Pearse's 
career as a teacher, we are told by P. Browne of 
Maynooth, " was nothing to the terrible seriousness 
that grew upon him when he came to realize the 
maladies of the political movement that was sup- 
posed to aim at Irish nationhood." Padraic Pearse 
accepted the necessity of choosing between submis- 
sion and rebellion. " The Volunteers, at whose 
foundation he had assisted, were at first negotiated 
with and then divided by the constitutional party; 
the original founders, who determined to adhere to 
their principles, were left high and dry without any 
constitutional support. The conviction gained on 
him that only blood could vivify what tameness and 
corruption had weakened, and that he and his com- 
rades were destined to go down the same dark road 
by which so many brave and illustrious Irishmen had 
gone before them." 1 

This tremendous decision of Padraic Pearse and 
his associates was not the result of temperamental 
intransigence. No whit less Catholic than Daniel 

[ 375 ] 



O'Connell, the rebels of 19 16 took their principle 
from Thomas Aquinas, " Human law is law only by 
virtue of its accordance with right reason : and thus 
it is manifest that it flows from the eternal law. 
And in so far as it deviates from right reason it is 
called an unjust law; in such case it is no law at all, 
but rather a species of violence." The rebels took 
their nationalism as right reason, against the com- 
promising of the parliamentary party. The lethal 
effect of Westminster on nationalism was thus dra^ 
matically and extravagantly thrown off. 

THE NEW ORDER 

The history of Irish freedom now dates from 
19 1 6 because, by the insurrection of 19 16, a new 
norm of political conduct was created for the Irish 
people. Before the insurrection Ireland felt dis- 
contented but impotent. The ways of English poli- 
tics baffled and depressed it, and the preparations of 
Ulster were like a bad dream. But the enormous 
effect of the insurrection on the government — the 
hasty executions, the deportations, the inpouring 
of troops into Ireland and the establishment of mili- 
tary tribunals — convinced Ireland that insurrection 
was a powerful agitant, and this greatly invigorated 
the national will. A national policy that seemed 
pardonable before, because inevitable, now came to 
be considered slack and trivial. The demands of 
Ireland rose by very reason of the sword laid against 
it. 

But revolution is not in itself progress. It is the 
violent catharsis of a poisoned society, a convulsion 
which predisposes men to a new convulsion at any 
[ 376] 



hint of old obedience and is likely to carry them from 
one vast impatience to another. If this war is the 
iron scourge that awaits the man " who makes his 
neighbor responsible for his own bad qualities," 
there is a similar scourge awaiting the revolutionist. 
After men have tasted revolution it is not only su- 
premely difficult to persuade them to any obedience, 
it is practically impossible to make them face their 
own bad qualities. To make the foreign govern- 
ment responsible — that becomes the mania of every 
sect not in power, so fragile are the silken threads 
that guide the human barbarian. 

In spite of every intractability, the Irish are eventu- 
ally obliged to take home rule as their goal and to 
formulate the terms on which they can accept it. 
They must return, that is to say, to constitutionalism. 
But it must be a strong and definite constitutionalism, 
not the menial kind accepted by the parliamentary 
party or the disdainful constitutionalism of the self- 
helpers. The first inflexible principle of this new 
constitutionalism should be fiscal autonomy, the rais- 
ing of Irish revenue by Ireland for Ireland, without 
interference from outside. This is the first indis- 
pensable condition of political freedom for Ireland. 
To give Westminster the control of Irish finance is 
to make Irish politics revolve around the imperial 
pork-barrel. It is to ensure the worst kind of de- 
pendence and to prohibit integrity. 

Before the insurrection, a number of Englishmen 
thought the best thing for Ireland would be to ar- 
range its dependence, and one of the most curious 
sights in high politics was to see sleek young im- 
perialists pussy-footing to a branch-office settlement. 

[ 377 ] 



The tone of The Round Table group is particularly 
worth noting in this connection. I have underlined 
two of their most characteristic phrases. 

" If ever it should prove expedient to unburden 
the Parliament of the United Kingdom by delegat- 
ing to the inhabitants of England, Ireland, Scotland 
and Wales the management of their own provincial 
affairs, and the condition of Ireland should prove no 
bar to such a measure, the Irish problem will once 
for all have been closed." The word " expedient " 
is not a bad clue to modern Round Table chivalry. 
It makes no difference that the succeeding page 
breathes of love, and refers sadly to " Ireland for- 
merly governed not in her own interests, but in those 
of Britain. The inevitable failure of this method." 
The rebels of 191 6 had much too masculine an atti- 
tude toward history to relish, " I know what is good 
for us both better than you can possibly know your- 
self." It was in great measure to kill this species 
of fawning kindness that Pearse and his comrades 
took up arms. To federalism-by-ukase they an- 
swered Rebellion ! Better to be extinguished than to 
submit to your tactful offices. Better than this velvet 
programme to expose, back of it, the tenacious im- 
perial claw. 

THE CORNERSTONE 

But the alternatives for Ireland are not federalism 
and rebellion. They are the permanent interna- 
tional disgrace of England and genuine home rule. 
And by genuine home rule is meant a measure which 
gives Ireland complete control of its own finances, its 
own excise and customs, its conscription; its adminis- 
tration of everything from police force to land pur- 
[ 378 ] 



chase, and its place alongside Canada and Australia 
and South Africa and New Zealand in imperial rep- 
resentation and conference. The importance of this 
status is partly psychological. It is mainly instru- 
mental. If Ireland is ever to recuperate it must be 
established in those free institutions which have 
answered the large purposes of the colonies. It must 
be treated as suffering from something besides ad- 
ministrative uneasiness. Unlike Wales and Scot- 
land, it must be observed to need an entire change of 
polity. It requires a different method of govern- 
ment, a new will back of it, a special regimen. 

The details of the regimen are beyond the scope 
of this book. I am content to say that the whole 
argument for Ireland's status as a dominion has been 
worked out to many Irishmen's complete satisfaction 
in Mr. Erskine Childers's The Framework of Home 
Rule. In that able and disinterested volume Mr. 
Childers has laid down " the broad proposition that, 
to the last farthing, Irish revenue must govern and 
limit Irish expenditure. For any hardship entailed 
in achieving that aim Ireland will find superabundant 
compensation in the moral independence which is the 
foundation of national welfare. She will be sorely 
tempted to sell part of her freedom for a price. At 
whatever cost, she will be wise to resist." This is 
not self-evident but it is the cornerstone of home 
rule policy. Until it is conceded there is no use con- 
sidering home rule. Many do not agree with Mr. 
Childers in regarding the big charge of old age 
pensions as controllable. Old age pensions in Ire- 
land might have been less per capita, but they were 
bound to be a monstrous charge, considering the huge 
proportion of old people, consequent on emigration. 

[ 379 ] 



To sustain twice as many old people as Scotland, 
Ireland ought to have had twice the population of 
Scotland. The anomaly of emigration gave it 
twice Scotland's burden on a population not even 
equal. Nothing could more completely reveal the 
unhealthy economic situation in Ireland. Who 
should be paying the old age pensions in Ireland? 
The emigrants, naturally. If Ireland could tax 
those emigrants the anomaly would not exist. 
Thanks to the emigration policy, Ireland has reaped 
this colossal harvest of dependents. Had it pos- 
sessed fiscal autonomy it might have paid the pen- 
sioners less than England, but this expedient could 
not disguise the real difficulty, going to the very 
bottom of centuries of bad government. This, how- 
ever, is only one item in expenditure on which Mr. 
Childers has raised a debatable point. His condem- 
nation of the " contract " finance that mars all the 
home rule bills hits at the true source of demoraliza- 
tion — the dissociation of revenue and expenditure, 
complicated by those " eleemosynary benefits " of 
which the Unionists make so much. Mr. Childers is 
right to say that Ireland must accept itself, with all 
its abnormalities and anomalies, for the sake of self- 
guidance, and he is wise to declare that the habit 
" of expecting ' restitution ' for funds unwarrantably 
levied in the past " must be broken. Has Ireland 
contributed £300,000,000 to the imperial exchequer 
since the union ? Then the thing to do is burn books 
and start anew. It is a bitter satisfaction to know 
that Ireland paid England in the past. Contribu- 
tions in future must be voluntary, and Irish house- 
keeping must be scaled like Denmark's or Norway's, 
not like Britain's. 

[ 38o ] 



THE FATE OF ULSTER 

Has Ulster any cause to fear the economics of the 
Catholic majority ? Perhaps Mr. Childers is biassed 
on this question. He has watched the agricultural 
organization society and admired it. " Here," he 
has said, " just because men are working together in 
a practical, self-contained, home-ruled organization 
for the good of the whole country, you will find 
liberality, open-mindedness, brotherhood, and keen, 
intelligent patriotism from Ulstermen and Southern- 
ers alike." But his judgment may be taken into ac- 
count, especially as the idea that the Irish parliament 
will divide on religious lines is too prevalent. " The 
Customs tariff is an Irish question," Mr. Childers 
puts it, " not an Ulster question. The interests of 
the Protestant farmers of North-East Ulster are 
identical with those of the rest of Ireland, and obvi- 
ously it will be a matter of the profoundest import- 
ance for Ireland as a whole to safeguard the interests 
of the ship-building and linen industries in the North 
in whatever way may seem best." This seems to me 
inescapable. I have heard some mean comments on 
Belfast in the south of Ireland — comments on man- 
ners and morals to match Belfast's comments on Dub- 
lin — but outside this agacement I think all Irishmen 
are proud of Belfast. This pride rises up when the 
segregation of Ulster is argued. There is a sprin- 
kling of Ulstermen all through the Catholic south, 
after all, and the Gilmores and Shields and Smiths 
and Wilsons and McElroys and McConnells and 
Riddles and Burdens add an extraordinarily advan- 
tageous leaven to the ordinary Catholic lump. To 
leave Ulster out of home rule would be an Irish 

[381 3 



calamity. That is the conviction on which a fiscal 
policy would be founded, and the only danger to Ire- 
land would be the danger that England has experi- 
enced in its partnership with the Scot. 

" Every Scotchman is an Englishman, but an Eng- 
lishman is not a Scotchman," President Lowell of 
Harvard has permitted himself to disclose. " The 
Scotch regard themselves as an elect race who are 
entitled to all the rights of Englishmen and to their 
own privileges besides. All English offices ought to 
be open to them, but Scotch posts are the natural 
heritage of the Scots. They take part freely in the 
debates on legislation affecting England alone, but 
in their opinion acts confined to Scotland ought to 
be, and in fact they are in the main, governed by the 
opinion of the Scotch members. Such a condition is 
due partly to the fact that Scotch institutions and 
ideas are sufficiently distinct from those of England 
to require special treatment, and not different enough 
to excite repugnance. It is due in part also to the 
fact that the Scotch are both a homogeneous and a 
practical people, so that all classes can unite in com- 
mon opinions about religion, politics and social jus- 
tice. The result is that Scotland is governed by 
Scotchmen in accordance with Scotch ideas, while 
Ireland has been governed by Englishmen, and until 
recently, in accordance with English ideas." 

This is an exceedingly acute analysis of a tenacious 
national temperament, and I am bold enough to 
prophesy that the fate of England will in turn be the 
fate of Ireland. Ulster will come into the Irish 
parliament scowling noli me tangere, and the south- 
ern Irish will be paralyzed with fear. The elect 
race will then proceed to run the government. As 
[382] 



the outcome of a long fight for independence it will 
be rather an anti-climax, but Ireland will have itself 
to thank. Having been a " bear " on home rule for 
thirty years, Ulster is in a perfect position to act the 
part of injured innocence and I can see the south of 
Ireland tumbling over itself to show its good nature. 
It is not for nothing that the emblem of Scotland is 
the thistle. But in being so eager to swallow the 
thistle the southern Irish are raising some doubt as 
to the correct emblem for new Ireland. 

THE HOPE OF HOME RULE 

It is scarcely necessary to say that home rule means 
the beginning of appropriate administration in Ire- 
land. " The administration of Ireland has been the 
conspicuous failure of the English government," Mr. 
Lowell has summed up. " Its history for a century 
has been a long tale of expedients, palliations and 
concessions, which have never availed to secure either 
permanent good order or the contentment and loyalty 
of the inhabitants. Each step has been taken, not of 
foresight, but under pressure. The repressive meas- 
ures have been avowedly temporary, devised to meet 
an emergency, not part of a permanent policy; while 
concessions, which if granted earlier might have had 
more effect, have only come when attention to the 
matter has been compelled by signs of widespread 
and grievous discontent. Catholic emancipation 
was virtually won by the Clare election; disestablish- 
ment of the Anglican church was hastened by the 
Fenian movement; the home rule bill followed the 
growth of the Irish parliamentary party, culminating 
in Parnell's hold upon the balance of power in the 
House of Commons ; and the land laws have resulted 

[383 ] 



from agrarian agitation. . . . The fact is that Irish 
problems lie beyond the experience of the English 
member and his constituents. Being unable to dis- 
tinguish readily a real grievance from an unreason- 
able demand, he does not heed it until he is obliged 
to; and the cabinet, with its hands already full, is 
not inclined to burn its fingers with matters in which 
the House is not deeply or generally interested. All 
this is merely one of the many illustrations of the 
truth that parliamentary government can work well 
only so far as the nation itself is fairly homogeneous 
in its political aspirations." 

With the establishment of dominion home rule, 
Ireland may look for whatever good there is to be 
found in parliamentary government, and not the 
least of that good may be a certain healthy disillu- 
sion. Some women have gone through divorce and 
re-marriage only to discover through their experi- 
ence of a second husband that many of the first hus- 
band's despised faults were mere average masculin- 
ity. Ireland may discover that a good many of the 
defects of English rule were simply the average 
defects of all rule, with perhaps a superior technique 
to England's credit. But the benefits of self-govern- 
ment will enormously compensate for such disillu- 
sion. And these benefits, the fruits of democracy, 
will for the first time be Ireland's. 

No democrat fears self-government for Ireland. 
The democrat believes that it is best for human be- 
ings to learn to judge for themselves. He believes 
that inflexible institutions are too frequently sacri- 
ficial, and distort men's natural desires. Only a fool 
will deny that freedom is dangerous. It neither 
connotes nor assures virtue. By putting a higher and 
[384] 



heavier responsibility on the individual, it makes 
failure more serious. Emancipation does not mean 
immunity from duty. It simply means a greater ease 
in ascertaining and performing duty, a greater power 
to verify one's means and one's ends. It is idle to 
pretend that accession of power cannot encourage the 
immoderate love of self. The greater a man's lib- 
erty, the more dangerous his possibilities. But 
while the democrat admits all this, he insists that 
when men do not judge for themselves, when they 
resign their destiny to a superior will, they are often 
not only compelled to go against their grain — which 
is often wholesome — but they are actually treated 
like slaves, forced to act against their own interests, 
their own well-being, their own disinterested prefer- 
ences, their own conscience. They find themselves, 
to use familiar words, exploited and oppressed. 
Believing that no man should be forced to make such 
essential sacrifices for the sake of a selfish master, 
the democrat stresses the natural desires and rights 
of mankind. He does not assert that every man 
is a law unto himself. He does not say that subor- 
dination is essentially vile. He does not believe that 
life is a perpetual assertion of his own rights against 
the rights of others. He does not take as his model 
the barnyard, where the only bit of fodder that at- 
tracts a hungry chicken is the bit that is already pre- 
empted. The democrat believes in goodwill and co- 
operation, in deference as well as preference. But 
he also believes in keeping a firm grip on his moral 
homestead, in consulting his own deepest needs and 
desires, in manifesting them, and in securing in this 
world the fullest possible scope for the powers with 
which he was born endowed, or which he discovers 

[385 ] 



as he proceeds through life. He is just as much 
opposed to the mean and jealous tyrannies of caste, 
as to the stupidity and cruelty of bad government. 
And he is just as anxious to resist caste and bu- 
reaucracy for society's sake as for his own, since he 
knows that more people hate meanness and jealousy, 
stupidity and cruelty, than love them; and that these 
things frustrate the fine possibilities of our present 
human estate. 

It would be pleasant to believe that the nationalist 
and the democrat come to the same conclusion from 
opposite sides, like two shear blades. Such, no 
doubt, would be the ideal conclusion if men could 
interlock democracy and nationalism. But at the 
present time no one can pretend that the blades are 
interlocked. They are crossed, but in conflict, not 
in union. 

Democracy is occupied, at bottom, with human 
agreements. It does not aim, as some people fondly 
imagine, at a rigid inexorable agreement, a compact 
of mediocrity. It aims, rather, that men should 
agree on certain uniform requirements, in order that 
they may be free to differ in spirit. It inevitably 
designs a constitution, a written agreement, and it 
aims to have every man a competent partner in that 
agreement, in order that the work of the world may 
be efficiently discharged, not as an enterprise in 
which men are joined for an ulterior motive, but as 
a preliminary to a larger personal life. 

Nationalism, on the other hand, looks to the end 
rather than the means. It is less concerned with 
the internal arrangements of a nation than with its 
consensus of emotion. It is occupied, at bottom, 
with human differences. It says that men differ 
[ 386 ] 



from the rest of the world, in order that they may 
agree among themselves. It is concerned, far more 
than democracy, with ulterior motives and external 
emphases, with leadership and heroes. It resents 
and resists intrusion, not on the ground of political 
or economic unsuitability but on the ground of social 
dissimilarity. It is jealous of its homogeneous so- 
cial character, and anxious about its powers of as- 
similation. 

Nationalists strive for congruity, assert congru- 
ity and feel congruity. For them nationhood is the 
evidence of an organism which, in the end, simply 
declares " I am." Their organism exists. And 
while this existence is justified as a moral reality by 
thousands upon thousands of human beings, the 
morality is an afterthought. There is something in 
the sentiment of nationhood that precedes morality 
— something like an egoism, which answers no ques- 
tions and gives no explanations, offers no credentials 
and submits to no parley, but asserts itself, obdu- 
rately and incontinently, regardless of convenience or 
" justice." It is a talent of mankind, vital and dan- 
gerous, capable of producing and economizing hap- 
piness, capable also of a competitive ferocity which 
disregards the simplest lessons of democracy and 
makes an ideal of its cruel leonine will. 

THE FRUITS OF HOME RULE 

Before the war, for example, Irish reconstruction 
was halted by the fears of vital nationalism, if one 
may so characterize all the racial and religious and 
economic prejudices that concentrate into the in- 
sensate opposition of Ulster. It is pathetic to reflect 
in 19 1 8 that there was nothing more immutable to 

[ 387 ] 



hinder Irish development in that crisis than the un- 
tutored nationalism of man. Such is no longer the 
case. The misfortune that has since befallen the 
whole world cannot help affecting the prospects and 
destiny of Ireland. While many farmers in Ireland 
have made money during the war, the finer dreams 
for Irish welfare are darkened and obscured by uni- 
versal waste and suffering. Most of the wise 
schemes for social reconstruction depend on cumula- 
tive activity, and whatever the defects of government 
both England and the United States have been ma- 
turing great lessons in education and political science. 
The penalty of war is too inordinate and oppressive 
to leave this development of human resources un- 
hampered. A city that has writhed in an earthquake 
may be " reconstructed," but after supreme efforts 
have been spent in clearing new foundations and re- 
building, the old capital values are not yet even re- 
stored. Since the war began six hundred million 
people have been busy consuming their capital, and 
the most titanic efforts will be needed before bare 
subsistence can once more be guaranteed. One re- 
quires to be on excellent terms with the inscrutable 
to take this calmly; and a weak nation like Ireland 
may easily tremble over the edge of convalescence 
and collapse forever under the vital expenditures of 
this epoch. All of us carry from the cradle the 
pleasant and wistful illusion that a hand is guiding 
us, that a kindly light is leading us. No such secur- 
ity exists. When one turns to study the southern 
United States in their long, dazed journey from the 
brink of the grave after the Civil War, the possibili- 
ties of pernicious social anaemia become more real. 
Small matters like the extirpation of patronage out 
[388] 



of civil service then become great matters. The 
business of government becomes a precious responsi- 
bility, with desolate emptiness or forced abnegation 
as the alternatives to regaining vitality. This is 
what Ireland faces. Even if the war does not drain 
away its tiny strength, it will be compelled to join 
the fierce economic struggle that is to be renewed 
once peace is signed. And in that struggle the mad- 
ness of war will still inflame men's veins. 

A RAILROAD POLICY 

One practical problem like the railway problem in 
Ireland must suffice to illustrate the demand on Irish 
statesmanship. Can £20,000,000 be raised to na- 
tionalize the railways? The majority report of the 
viceregal commission urges regular supplies, large 
consignments, good packing of produce, and co- 
operation among producers, but, it continues, " if 
the export trade in agricultural products has not ex- 
panded as much as the proximity of Ireland to Great 
Britain might have led us to expect, in view of the 
rapid increase in British exports from foreign coun- 
tries, the case of other Irish industries is even worse, 
since, with few exceptions, they have not only shown 
no expansion, but have declined, sometimes to the 
point of extinction. Of such declines the woollen 
trade, and the textile and pottery industries, furnish 
conspicuous examples. With regard to the last we 
were told that works had been closed, owing to short- 
age of labor due to the loss of population by emi- 
gration. . . . The export rates, and also the local 
rates, should be reduced where reduction is essential 
to the development of Irish industry, but this is a 
policy which the existing companies cannot be ex- 

[389] 



pected to adopt, and we can see no adequate means 
of putting it into effect unless by acquisition, unifica- 
tion, and public direction of all the Irish railways. 
... If the decline of Irish industries in general, and 
the total disappearance of many, were largely the 
result of what we may term the earlier transit ar- 
rangements, it is plain that the changes necessary to 
encourage the revival of those defunct manufactur- 
ers, now that a fully developed system of import 
through rates and transit facilities is in active opera- 
tion, must be comprehensive and far-reaching. In 
our view the Irish railways have not been, and are 
not, ' fully utilized ' for the development of general 
industries in Ireland, owing to the competitive rates 
on imported goods being so much lower in scale than 
the local rates, that the development of local manu- 
factures has been discouraged and prevented, rather 
than assisted as it should have been." 

These conclusions were undoubtedly influenced by 
the premier of New Zealand and by various Austra- 
lian witnesses, testifying to the common advantage 
of governing railways with a view to service rather 
than dividends. The minority report did not fail to 
point out that conditions in Ireland and Australia 
are not similar. The majority politely agreed, but 
clung to the principle of public service, especially in 
regard to financing and managing Irish railways. 
No board of commercial men and railway directors, 
according to this principle. " We recommend that 
the unified railways be controlled and administered 
by an Irish Railways Board composed of twenty 
directors, twelve elected to represent the ratepayers 
of Ireland, two nominated by the treasury, two 
nominated by the lord lieutenant, and, with a view 
[ 390 ] 



to the direct representation of important interests 
and industries, one elected by the Irish port and har- 
bor authorities, one by the Irish chambers of com- 
merce, one by the Irish industrial development asso- 
ciations, and one by the associations of the Irish cat- 
tle trade." As to finance, " we recommend that the 
acquisition of the railways be effected by the issue of 
a state guaranteed stock, the interest on which would 
be a just charge on the net revenue of the unified 
system." A general rate, plus a state grant, should 
meet any deficit. 

This is a broad policy. Can Ireland force it 
through, with the prospect of fiscal advantage be- 
yond ? This is the kind of question that makes a full 
home rule measure so enormously important. A 
small measure will be another effort to huddle up a 
festering wound. 

THE DEMOCRATIC MINIMUM 
Two apparently opposed opinions come to my 
mind as I say this. One is John Morley's, the other 
Dr. Carl Jung's. 

Speaking of reforms passionately desired, political 
hopes passionately held, John Morley remarks char- 
acteristically, " There is nothing more amusing or 
more instructive than to turn to the debates in par- 
liament or the press upon some innovating proposal, 
after an interval since the proposal was accepted by 
the legislature. The flaming hopes of its friends, 
the wild and desperate prophecies of its antagonists, 
are found to be each as ill-founded as the other. 
The measure which was to do such vast good accord- 
ing to the one, such portentous evil according to the 
other, has done only a part of the promised good, 

[ 39i ] 



and has done none of the threatened evil. The true 
lesson from this is one of perseverance and thor- 
oughness from the improver, and one of faith in the 
self-protectiveness of a healthy society for the con- 
servative. The master error of the latter is to sup- 
pose that men are moved mainly by their passions 
rather than their interests, that all their passions are 
presumably selfish and destructive, and that their own 
interests can seldom be adequately understood by 
the persons most directly concerned. How many 
fallacies are involved in this group of propositions, 
the reader may well be left to judge for himself." 

Out of these grave and subdued reflections, as out 
of everything John Morley writes, there comes a 
sense of that powerful sanity, that patient tolerance 
of durable fact, which makes him a clue to the 
temper of sound structural politics. But we who see 
the four walls of Ireland standing bare without the 
roof cannot dwell on the vanity of ill-founded hopes. 
We must turn to those who never tire of proclaiming 
their faith in self-reliance and independence, and who 
disregard the timid and the conservative. " The 
moralist least of all trusts God," as Carl Jung has 
said, " for he thinks that the beautiful tree of human- 
ity can only thrive by dint of being pruned, bound, 
and trained on a trellis, whereas Father-Sun and 
Mother-Earth have combined to make it grow joy- 
fully in accordance with its own laws, which are full 
of the deepest meaning." It is this faith in the indi- 
vidual, combined with a belief that " a metamorpho- 
sis in the attitude of the individual is the only possi- 
ble beginning of a transformation in the psychology 
of the nation," which convinces me that the Irish 
people must concede nothing of their demand for a 

[ 392 ] 



democratic minimum, full fiscal autonomy and do- 
minion home rule. 

l'envoi 

Standing at this point to look back on Irish his- 
tory, I see nothing to bind my soul. They call Ire- 
land the dark Rosaleen, a woman beautiful and vio- 
lated. She was ravished from her house, seized in 
imperial lust, beaten, broken, brutalized, seduced, 
and thrown aside. False was her betrayer, heartless 
and cold. And now she stands before his gates, a 
tear in her eye, the woman who has suffered wrong. 
It is a bitter accusation, my brooding mother, but this 
is a bitter world. Be hard! Many a woman who 
has suffered wrong has wrapped her cloak about her, 
and steeled her wounded heart. Wisely, bravely, 
clearly, she has borne her wounds. There is always 
the future; and life needs a strong hand. 

"What have I to do with lamentation?" The 
tradition of Ireland is priceless. On Empire's neck 
hangs the sacred albatross. England, glorious Eng- 
land, proud and mighty, dream of loyal warriors, 
heritage of crafty rulers — what has she but the 
burden of the world ? Poor England, I say and feel. 
I think of Henry, tow-headed, sturdy, blunt, pluck- 
ing the beards of the Irish chieftains and laughing 
at their wattled roofs. A magnificent creature, 
Henry, brave and resourceful beyond belief, alive in 
every fibre, the cells in his body bounding with a 
special dazzling speed. Power — he wanted power 
over everything, turned precedents upside down, 
wrenched classes by their roots, bullied saints, defied 
popes, leaped from island to continent and continent 
to island, rode four horses at a gallop, and huzza'd 

[ 393 ] 



to Heaven. And then, an old Henry, wounded in 
his lair, breathless, listening- for the crackle of the 
brambles, stalked to the death by his own thin-lipped 
sons. He played to win, gaining with that radiant 
smile, nimble of wit, tearing the heart out of learned 
books in the intervals of action, faithful to none, 
but close to reality, drawing all men to the fire of life. 
And the radiance dies, leaving Ireland cowered in 
the corner, horror in her eyes, the sickly moonlight 
on the wreckage of her feast, broken bread, spilled 
wine. 

Brass knuckles beat on bare flesh when the Nor- 
mans fought the Gaels. They came from rich and 
haughty towns, insolent with life. They found the 
Gaels simple and isolated, ready for war, able to 
die, but children in the way of the world. Castles of 
stone rose over the Irish towns, and the dragon 
ravened through the land. It was hell on earth, in 
its time. But that dragon is decrepit at last. If we 
be St. Georges, let us meet the dragon that still 
breathes fire. 

Today those impregnable castles have suffered one 
price of being impregnable — they are sterile, bar- 
ren, dead, the sepulchre of their class. Lonely cas- 
tles, with a lonely English servitor at the wicket, dry 
of human kindness for want of milking, and no one 
at home — a peacock lording it in the solitude of the 
lawn. Are they to be envied, the inheritors, cut off 
from warm variegated life, chilly in their loftiness, 
excluded from the friendly hearth? I would not 
wear a Norman coronet in Ireland, and sit in the 
wind of antipathy, for all the revenue in the land. 
They are cheered, of course, by their own. But it is 
hard to conduct the sap when the bark is stripped. 
[ 394 ] 



Their branch rises high, but does not pull well from 
the roots. 

Why should we afflict ourselves with the memories 
of these sterile castles? Did the ancestor of the 
Cootes say he " liked such frolics " when a soldier 
stuck a Wicklow baby, and danced it aloft on his 
pike? Did the ancestor of Birr Castle order babies 
to be killed, because "nits will make lice"? Did 
another ancestor, the Irish Privy Council of their 
time, change the branding of priests with a red-hot 
iron to castration, " the most effectual method that 
can be found out, to clear this nation of those dis- 
turbers of the peace and quiet of the Kingdom " ? 
True, every bit, but no longer binding the future. 
Let the Irish hug these memories, and believe one 
Coote to be another Coote, one Earl of Rosse to be 
another Earl of Rosse, and life will be a mere in- 
heritance of woe. There is a new day in the land, a 
day that looks forward, a young day. And one only 
looks back, as I do, to look out and beyond. 



THE END 



I 395 ] 



APPENDIX 

THE SKELETON OF IRELAND 



THE SKELETON OF IRELAND 
I. POPULATION 1 

1. The total number of Irish emigrants from May I, 
185 1, to December 31, 1914, was 4,399,390. This emigra- 
tion of 63 years exceeds the present total population. 

2. Since 1846 the population of Ireland has steadily fallen. 
Since 1 80 1 the population of the United Kingdom has 
steadily risen. The figures of Ireland and Scotland are 
worth comparing: 

Ireland Scotland 

Population Per sq. mile Population Per sq. mile 

1801 5,395456 166 1,608,420 54 

1811 5,937,856 186 1,805,864 60 

1821 6,801,827 209 2,091,521 70 

1831 7,767,401 239 2,364,386 79 

1841 8,175,124 251 2,620,184 88 

1851 6,552,385 201 2,888,742 97 

1861 5,798,564 178 3,062,294 100 

1871 5,412,377 167 3,360,018 113 

1881 5,174,836 159 3,735,573 125 

1891 4,704,750 144 4,025,647 135 

1901 4,458,775 137 4,472,io3 150 

1911 4,390,219 135 4,760,904 160 

3. The marriage rate is exceedingly low in Ireland, 
partly owing to the steady emigration of persons of mar- 
riageable ages. Comparing Ireland and Scotland in 1900, 
when the populations were practically equal (4,450,000), 
these were the figures: 

1 These figures are from The Statesman's Year-Book, with a few 
exceptions. 

[ 399 ] 



Ireland Scotland 

Births 101,459 131,401 

Deaths 87,606 82,296 

Marriages 22,3 1 1 32,444 

4. The proportion of defectives in Ireland is the highest 
in the British Isles. 

Ireland Scotland 

Insane ( 191 1 ) 24,394 18,636 

Blind ( 1900) 4,263 3,253 

5. The distribution of religions in Ulster is important in 
connection with home rule. The figures published in the 
census reports of 191 1 were as follows: 



County Total 

Antrim 478,603 

Armagh .... 119,625 

Cavan 91,071 

Donegal .... 168,420 

Down 304,589 

Fermanagh .. 61,811 

Londonderry . 140,621 
Monaghan . . 71, 395 

Tyrone 142,437 



Cath- 


Prot- 


Presby- 


Meth- 


Oth- 


olic 


estant 


terian 


odist 


ers 


n 8,449 


128,552 


188,018 


20,377 


32,207 


54.147 


38,867 


18,962 


5,010 


2,639 


74,188 


12,954 


2,920 


768 


241 


132,943 


17,975 


15,064 


1,697 


74i 


78,946 


73,695 


116,971 


n,497 


18,480 


34,749 


21,121 


1,265 


3,995 


681 


64,436 


27,080 


43,i9i 


i,939 


3,975 


53,34i 


8,644 


8,635 


389 


386 


78,935 


32,283 


26,540 


2,818 


1,861 



Total 1,578,572 690,134 366,171 421,566 48,490 52,211 

6. In all Ireland religions were distributed as follows in 
1911 : 

Catholics 3,242,670 

Protestant 

Presbyterians 

Methodists 

Jews 

All others 

Information refused 

7. Because Ireland is predominantly agricultural and 
Scotland predominantly industrial, all comparisons are likely 
to be misleading. It is corrective to note the differences in 
national occupation. 

[ 400 ] 



Total 


Percentage 


,242,670 


73-9 


576,611 


I3-I 


440,525 


1 0.0 


62,382 


1.4 


5,H8 


.2 


60,504 


1-3 


2,379 


.1 



Ireland Scotland 

Urban 1,384,929 3,591,276 

Rural 3,005,290 1,169,628 

Ireland (1911) 

Occupation Males Females Total 

Professional class 103,603 37,531 141,134 

Domestic 25,831 144,918 170,749 

Commercial 101,396 9,747 111,143 

Agricultural 721,669 59,198 780,867 

Industrial 434,699 178,698 613,397 

Indefinite and non-produc- 
tive 804,850 1,768,079 2,572,929 

Scotland (1911) 1 

Occupation Males Females Total 

Government and defence. . 42,476 4,932 47,408 

Professional 45,713 35,962 81,675 

Domestic 34,488 166,578 201,066 

Commercial and transport. 245,621 37,844 283,465 

Agricultural and fishing.. 193,731 33, 380 227,111 

Industrial 911,728 315,514 1,226,242 

Unoccupied and non-pro- 
ductive 309,024 1,333,410 1,647,434 

II. WEALTH 

1. Ireland is a poor country. A few illustrative figures 
may be quoted to show the poverty of Ireland compared 
with Scotland. 

Ireland Scotland 

Income tax (1915) £ 2,182,000 £ 7,326,000 

Gross income (1913) 

houses 5,419,000 21,202,000 

land 9,699,000 5,713,000 

Railway receipts (1913) 4,902,000 14,900,000 

Post office savings (191 3) 13,161,895 8,008,985 

Trustee savings (1913) 2,652,018 20,114,443 

1 The Scottish figures do not include 1,046,503 persons under 10 
years of age. 

[ 40I ] 



2. The total imports of Ireland in 1913 amounted to 
£73»673>ooo. The total exports amounted to £73,886,000. 
As compared with Scotland, however, the direct commerce 
was small: 

Ireland Scotland 

Direct imports (1914) £14,562,992 £47,837,053 

Direct exports (19 14) 1,219,812 45,315,063 

3. The fisheries of Ireland and Scotland may weli be com- 
pared to illustrate the backwardness of Ireland in one mod- 
ern industry. 

Ireland Scotland 

Fish taken (1913) 33,820 tons 362,994 tons 

Value £294,625 £3,723,357 

Sailing boats (1914) 5,077 6,051 

Steam boats 213 1,950 

Net tonnage 27,882 129,261 

4. The Irish Cooperative Movement included 947 societies, 
June 30, 1913. The membership numbered 101,991 and the 
turnover was £3,205,189. The total farm produce and food- 
stuffs imported into Ireland in 19 12 was valued at £20,000,- 
OOO. 

5. In 19 1 2 the average weekly earnings of railway servants 
were as follows: 

England and Wales, 28s. od. (415,197 employed) 

Scotland 24s. 4d. (47,499 employed) 

Ireland 20s. gd. (20,209 employed) 

III. GOVERNMENT 

I. The government of Ireland is grossly extravagant. 
The main items in extravagance are the cost of maintaining 
an imperial police force, an excessively expensive judiciary 
and a viceregal establishment. These extravagances may be 
surmised from the civil service estimates, 19 16-17. Remem- 
bering that 36,000,000 was the population of England and 
Wales in 191 1, and 4,400,000 the population of Ireland, the 
comparison in judicial expenses is noteworthy. It is scarcely 
necessary to say that there is absolutely nothing in the crim- 
inal records of Ireland to account for the figures. Crime in 
[ 402 ] 



Ireland is slightly greater than crime in Scotland since 1910, 
having been less than crime in Scotland in the previous de- 
cade. 

Ireland 

Supreme Court £ 1 12,570 

Land Commission 753>9 T 8 

County Court 101,284 

Police 1,473,568 

Prisons 1 10,190 

Reformatories 109,788 

Scotland 

Courts of Justice 83,746 

Prisons 100,635 

U. K. and England 

Supreme Court 327,416 

County Courts 1 10, 1 74 

Police, England and Wales 108,282 

Prisons, England and Colonies 680,090 

Reformatories G. B 335,384 

Ireland 

Public education 1,812,704 

Scotland 

Public education 2,544,742 

2. For the year ending March 31, 1915, the Irish services 
cost £12,656,000 and the Scotch cost £10,178,000. But the 
Scotch revenue was much greater, owing to the superior 
wealth and superior taxable capacity of Scotland. 

Net Revenue Ireland Scotland 

Customs £3,674,000 £3,919,000 

Excise 3,629,000 5,647,000 

Estate duties 1 ,070,000 4,000,000 

Stamps 323,000 568,000 

Land tax — 32,000 

House duty — 129,000 

Income tax 2,182,000 7,326,000 

Land value duties 2,000 62,000 

Postal service 996,000 1,971,000 

Telegraph service 1 95, 000 287,000 

[ 403 ] 



Net Revenue Ireland Scotland 

Telephone service 188,000 673,000 

Crown lands 19,000 30,500 

Miscellaneous 11 1,500 97>50o 

Total £12,389,500 £24,742,000 

3. The resources of Ireland are further painfully disclosed 
in the figures of local taxation. 

Local Taxation 

Ireland Scotland 

Receipts from (1912-13) (1912-13) 

Rates £3,300,828 £7,403,108 

Water undertakings 345,393 1,1 45, 632 

Gas 429,404 2,311,458 

Electric light 210,338 717,880 

Tramways, etc 255,740 1,413,323 

Tolls, dues, etc 431,568 1,410,942 

Rents, etc 327,542 285,313 

Sales of property 83,954 

Government contributions 1,410,073 2,979,095 

Loans 1,602,988 2,181,296 

Misc 489,698 812,041 

Total receipts £8,803,572 £20,767,568 

Expenditure by 

Town and municipal authorities for 
police, sanitary and other public 

works, etc 3,545,690 10,603,599 

For poor relief, etc 1,318,560 1,736,801 

County authorities for police, luna- 
tic asylums, etc 2,332,781 2,216,936 

Rural and parish councils, etc. ... 905,058 21,409 

School boards and secondary edu- 
cation committees — 4,404,695 

Harbor authorities 595,323 1,530,523 

Other authorities 170,663 89,559 

Total expenditures £8,868,075 £20,603,522 

[ 404 ] 





















































































































































































. 

























































' 






> 




































% 











